Learning with Damaged Colonial Places: Posthumanist Pedagogies from a Joburg Preschool (Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories) 9811614202, 9789811614200

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Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors: Karen Malone · Marek Tesar · Sonja Arndt

Theresa Magdalen Giorza

Learning with Damaged Colonial Places Posthumanist Pedagogies from a Joburg Preschool

Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories Series Editors Karen Malone, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC, Australia Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand Sonja Arndt, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

This book series presents original and cutting edge knowledge for a growing field of scholarship about children. Its focus is on the interface of children being in the everyday spaces and places of contemporary childhoods, and how different theoretical approaches influence ways of knowing the future lives of children. The authors explore and analyse children’s lived embodied everyday experiences and encounters with tangible objects and materials such as artefacts, toys, homes, landscapes, animals, food, and the broader intangible materiality of representational objects, such as popular culture, air, weather, bodies, relations, identities and sexualities. Monographs and edited collections in this series are attentive to the mundane everyday relationships, in-between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be’, with matters and materials. The series is unique because it challenges traditional western-centric views of children and childhood by drawing on a range of perspectives including Indigenous, Pacifica, Asian and those from the Global South. The book series is also unique as it provides a shift from developmental, social constructivists, structuralist approaches to understanding and theorising about childhood. These dominant paradigms will be challenged through a variety of post-positivist/postqualitative/posthumanist theories of being children and childhood.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15731

Theresa Magdalen Giorza

Learning with Damaged Colonial Places Posthumanist Pedagogies from a Joburg Preschool

Theresa Magdalen Giorza University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

ISSN 2523-3408 ISSN 2523-3416 (electronic) Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories ISBN 978-981-16-1420-0 ISBN 978-981-16-1421-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

For Botle Sphamandla and Alda

Foreword: Co-researching Post-age Learning in Damaged Colonial Johannesburg

Theresa Giorza’s book is a deeply entangled political and personal story of unlearning privilege by becoming-with damaged colonial spaces. Staying with the complexity and the living contradictions of this position, first as “powerless child” and later “vulnerable woman in a violent society”, Theresa’s stories are filled with hope for the existence of other possible (educational) worlds. The picture of the geopolitical and environmental landscape of the place where Theresa now lives and works is bleak. Originally from Zimbabwe, she paints an honest picture of how her present home, South Africa, has struggled to rebuild a country scarred by centuries of colonial exploitation. Despite promises to the contrary by various governments, deep inequalities continue to worsen. The reasons for this, she explains, are varied and complex: the corporate ownership of mines, export of stocks and shares offshore, pervasive corruption, mismanagement, and a largely unskilled workforce due to the historical legacy of apartheid’s intentionally inferior Bantu education system for black South Africans. The current educational system is also multi-tiered and inequitable: a government system largely for the poor, but with a smallish number of quality schools for the middle and upper middle classes, and an upmarket independent system for the rich. A large number of children do not attend school at all, and those who do and who sometimes live in poverty and attend school hungry are often victims of corporal punishment, sexual abuse or mental humiliation. Such inequality between the rich and the poor has severely worsened since the COVID19 pandemic. The South African government do not provide education for children under the age of five and parents have to rely on private early childhood centres they can ill afford, run by under-qualified, underpaid staff. Theresa’s research is in such a centre, a preschool offering a reasonable introductory education programme, but challenged by poverty and corruption. Can such a setting provide hope for children’s futures? How can children themselves be welcomed as co-researchers into such colonial spaces? These questions drive the many narratives woven into this fascinating book. Theresa is well qualified and is in a unique position to perform this affirmative posthuman arts-based enquiry. Theresa Giorza is a teacher-educator at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. The doctoral research this manuscript draws on has greatly benefited from her undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Fine Arts as well as Education. vii

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Her art background performs a critical role in her investigations—a powerful transdisciplinary blend of educational science and the creative arts. Her knowledge of contemporary art is important, not so much to teach art to children, but to approach the everyday with an artistic and philosophical attitude. As an inheritor of colonial white privilege, her own subjectivity is entangled with her writing, not only from her experiences as a teacher in a high school, a government official, a lecturer at university, an activist in the non-government sector, an artist/maker of things, a resident of the inner-city suburb where the research was situated but also, and especially, as an academic researcher. Theresa weaves an intricate analysis of the data, co-created with the children, grass, names, leaves, paper, gold mines, dust, pens, car thieves, early childhood education curriculum, fraud, Grade R policies, philosophical theories and so forth. These original diffractive analyses are competently assisted by a range of contemporary philosophers such as Karen Barad, Jane Bennett, Rosi Braidotti, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Donna Haraway, Achille Mbembe, Brian Massumi and Elisabeth Grosz, educational theorists including Loris Malaguzzi, Lev Vygotsky, Walter Kohan, David Kennedy and Joanna Haynes and Southern African educationalists Hassina Ebrahim, Leketi Makalela and Fikile Nxumalo. Theresa’s research offers a fresh perspective on the current decolonisation debate which is often restrictively reduced to identity politics. Inspired by Karen Barad’s agential realism, she disrupts unilinear notions of time and progress. Resisting the use of concepts that point at prescribed end points, such as transformation and liberation, she tempts the reader to stay with the complexities and find ways to (not)belong and to be (dis)connected. She suggests we should leave the future to itself and to stay with the trouble. With reference to Donna Haraway, she says she can offer only ‘small gestures of hope that will contaminate, compound, and compost into a hot and generative catalyst that can bubble from below’. Adopting the diffractive methodology, she creates decolonising insights that demand a relational ontology, epistemology, aesthetics and ethics for education on a damaged planet. Decolonising public spaces involves not only changing ownership and inherited entitlements but also the need to include ethical and political discussions about the deep institutionalised inequalities between children and adults. These injustices that have enabled narrow human-centred education also sustain the kind of learning that privileges culture over nature, adult over child and human over non-human. Children have been historically excluded and dismissed as not being fully human, fellow citizens or co-producers of knowledge. Theresa wonders how adult humans can open up educational spaces that pay care-full attention to these marks of erasure, division and exclusion. How can response-able knowledge be generated that includes wilder and less predictable encounters between people of all ages while including morethan-human participants? While answering this key question, Theresa takes us on a fascinating journey of dislodging well-established habits and ingrained beliefs about ‘child’, ‘teacher’ and ‘land’. She engages the reader in the minutest details that profoundly matter in her postdevelopmental account of the collaborative learning of a group of five-year-olds in an inner-city Johannesburg preschool. The book provides you as a reader considerable cause for hope by showing practical ways in which we can live with/in, and research, a world of difference(s).

Foreword: Co-researching Post-age Learning in Damaged Colonial …

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Through careful and detailed analyses of examples, the book explores how children can be included in the decisions that affect learning—not as discrete individual entities but always already entangled and intricately connected with other human and non-human be(com)ings. The diffractive engagement with the political nature of the seemingly mundane and every day is really striking. By following children’s own interests and the respectful inclusion of children’s artwork, and by documenting their learning, Theresa exemplifies what it means to listen to children. After all, children are ready and willing participants in learning as a worlding process. Inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to teaching and learning, Theresa regards the environment as a ‘third teacher’ in the way it plays an active role in research creation. Reggio Emilia is intricately related to Philosophy with Children (P4C), and Theresa’s research practices demonstrate how the commitment of these democratic pedagogies to collaborative learning expresses a deep respect for children’s intelligence and capability, even in resource-constrained environments. Her diffractive engagement with Reggio Emilia and P4C brings to the ‘rough and uneven ground’ of preschool practice the art of noticing the more-than-human dimension of relational educational encounters. The stories in the book are powerful assemblages of image and text. The book is sprinkled with examples—many visual—that will easily resonate with the reader because of their everyday-ness, like the names we are given and how they work as material-discursive agents as part of the very same world we inhabit. These frozen images are agentic, in the sense that the video recordings from which they emerged mediate access to data. They are also agentic in the way Theresa performs them in a process of re-turning that makes the reader re-consider children’s capabilities and what it means to listen to a young co-learner. Staying with what is important to a five-year-old, she points out that names in their myriad ‘doings’ are central to the life of a preschooler. The powerful practice of naming is haunted by slavery and colonial acquisition, but it is from one of the young African children in the study that the importance of naming emerges. Theresa’s writing is poignant and profound, honest but also modest. She manages to make you think and to do research differently without moralising or pointing the finger. On the contrary, she very movingly expresses her vulnerabilities as researcherwoman, for example, in the Tausa tree diffraction (Fig. 7.6). She is not a researcher who ‘parachuted’ into this working class, mostly black community, to ‘collect’ her data. Living in the same community herself, the stories she tells are profound, deeply political, brutally honest, realistic and compassionate. She paints a down-to-earth picture without sentimentality or romanticising what it is like to live and work in the preschool. The reality of doing research in countries where there is extreme poverty might be familiar to researchers in the South, but is a profound revelation for academics working in the North where there are little or no such deep inequalities. One example was her losing her fieldwork notebook when thieves broke into her locked parked car and stole her backpack. There is no space here for moralising and claims of innocence that only testify to one’s own white privilege. She clearly cares deeply for the children and adults she lives and works with in this community. As a reader, you get swept away into the educational complexities of teaching through the narratives of someone completely embedded and embodied in warts-and-all Jozi—a

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city people either love or love to hate. Childhood research from the South is rare. But research situated in the South by a researcher from the South that renders black children living in severe poverty capable by paying attention to the tiny intricate details that matter is a unique addition to this book series. The book gives tremendous cause for hope during these extraordinary times of a pandemic that is sweeping the world, and deepening the inequalities between the poor and the rich made worse by the digital divide. Theresa provides a compelling exploration into possible pedagogies with/in damaged colonial places. The timing of this book is perfect, considering the international trend of pouring more funds into the early childhood sector. The book is not only informative about early years provision in a country like South Africa, but the reader will also find it resonates with their own context as the challenges to offer alternatives to developmental approaches to early years education are increasingly on the global agenda. The book contains philosophical speculations as well as very practical curriculum suggestions that will not cost money, but simply require imagination and determination. Distinguishing teaching from learning, Theresa suggests, would be a good start because it enables us to notice the inseparability of our daily intimate experiences from our wider geopolitical and historical realities. This proposal is a refreshing change in the current educational climate and makes a powerful contribution to postdevelopmental and post-age discourses. It should speak to the community of early childhood educators who are concerned about an over-regulated and standardised approach to measuring children’s performances in the early years. Theresa’s book is indeed, as she says herself, an “unfinished story” and “continues beyond the pages of this book as do the lives of all protagonists who continue their journeys of loving, learning and becoming”. It leaves us desiring more by this author to help guide us along these urgent journeys into indeterminate futures. Dr. Karin Murris Professor of Early Childhood Education University of Oulu Oulu, Finland Emerita Professor of Education University of Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa

Acknowledgements

This book is the product of many connections, events, questions and shared ideas. Many thanks are in order. To Karen Malone for her inspiring scholarship and generosity. To her, and her fellow editors on this series, Sonja Arndt and Marek Tesar, for giving me the opportunity to write this book. The research that sparked the project off was inspired and carried along by on-going collaborations with Karin Murris, initially as my Ph.D. supervisor and then as leader of the Decolonising Childhood Discourses research project, together with Viv Bozalek. Thank you—this work would not/could not have happened without you. The Decolonising Childhood Discourses project has provided a thinking and writing space over the past few years and drawn in a host of zoom/skype/WhatsApp companions. Thank you, Joanne Peers, Rose-Anne Reynolds, Anya Morris, Veronica Mitchell, Susie Taylor-Alston, Lynn Chambers, Nora Ramsden and Norma Rudolph and the other thirty people on the expanding group, for the intra-actions. Thinking in creative, critical, collaborative and caring ways makes a difference (I thank Feminist slow scholarship and the Community of Philosophical Enquiry for that). The initial research towards this writing was made possible through funding by the National Research Foundation and the Andrew Mellon Foundation. Thank you for the opportunity. And thank you to Ulla Lind and Fikile Nxumalo for insightful critique of earlier iterations of this work. I am grateful to Claire Bènit-Gbaffou for sharing pre-publication research writing and for enjoyable intra-disciplinary conversations. Thanks to all my research participants and their families who will recognise themselves in the stories. Thank you for trusting my judgment. The Mimosa school and AREA families: Heather Barclay, Judith Browne, Marion Drew, Sheila Drew, Tessa Browne, Lucy Thornton, and Professor Phillip Harrison also Lindi Bell of Smallworld—some of you have read drafts or engaged with presentations on my work and your responses have mattered. All of you have fed my thinking and feeling about early childhood matters and urban childhoods. Thanks to my homies at CDP, Makers Valley and Changemaker Children—Simon Sizwe Mayson, Deyana Thomas, Shamielah Smith and Lassie Ndalela. I am inspired by your work and commitment and hope I have added to the energetic flows that enable you to do what you do even better. To the team at #ArtMyJozi—thank you for letting me include your story. I owe gratitude to my colleagues at the School of xi

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Education at the University of the Witwatersrand especially Kate Earle, Colwyn Martin, Nick Lebopa, Geeta Motilal and Kerryn Dixon. The whole team in the Division have made it possible for me to take the time generously funded by our Faculty of Humanities research committee to focus on writing this book for three months. Thank you, colleagues, and thank you to the committee. Viv Linington and Lorayne Excell, I am deeply grateful that you agreed to step in for this period. Moyra Keane, thank you for your inspiring writing retreats and responsive reading. Thabisile Levin, Alda Makama, Stephen Marais, Rochelle Mawona, Thobeka Mabaso, your help and support was invaluable in different ways. My ‘coven’ in Johannesburg and my Harare/Cape Town Madzimai, thank you for keeping me moderately sane and putting up with my absences and silences. My in-house editor, layout coach, politics and urban planning touchstone, Maurice Smithers, is the steady and steadying force behind the scenes, and companion through the rough and the smooth. Sections of the text have appeared elsewhere in similar form: Chap. 6 has appeared as a journal article: Videography as Refrain: Diffracting with Forward, Backward and Stop in a Preschool Outing. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 4(1), 116–137. Thank you to the editors of the special edition for permission to include this published material. Sections of Chaps. 1 and 9 form part of a collaborative paper written with Laura Brooks, Rurhandzu Khosa, Minenhle Maphumulo and Simon Sizwe Mayson for the South African Cities Network (SACN), entitled: How cities can ease spatial inequalities in early childhood development and enhance collective well-being. My thanks go to the following photographers for their kind permission to incorporate their images into my writing: Gideon Mendel for this Inner-city Park from 1985; Georges Senga for Footprint, from 2009 and William Matlala, for Cleaners marching for higher wages, from 1994. Thank you also to The Trinity Session & #ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew as well as Deyana Thomas and Lassie Ndalela of CDP and Changemaker Children for the images included in Chap. 9. Surely thanks must also go to the authors of all the referenced material put to work in this book. Karen Barad, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing stand out as inspiring motivators for thinking-with and finding ways to live (and die) in more response-able ways. The struggles continue…

Contents

1 Setting off . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.1 Creating Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.2 A Neighbourhood Crèche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.3 Beyond Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1.4 Making Worlds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

1 2 5 6 12 16

2 Owning Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 (Un) Ethical Encounters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.2 How to Steal a Crèche . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.3 ECD in South Africa Now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4 What’s Happening in Grade R? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.5 Politics in the Preschool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.6 Competing Paradigms in Early Childhood Education . . . . . . . . . . . 2.7 Exploring Alternative Ontologies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.8 A Different Kind of ‘Real’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.9 Nature and the Human . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.10 Pedagogy as Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

19 20 20 21 24 25 27 29 30 31 34 35

3 Windfall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.1 Incidental and Intra-Active Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 There Are Four Seasons in the Year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 What Counts as Art? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Finding Materials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.5 Politics and Desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.6 Philosophy with Children, the Community of Enquiry and the Centrality of Concepts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.7 Troubling Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.8 Forces of Meaning and Matter(ing) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.9 Democratic Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.10 Technologies of Enquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

39 39 43 47 48 49 52 53 55 58 59 63 xiii

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Contents

4 Diffractive Encounters with Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.1 Notes on Posthuman Notions of Knowing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Transcript Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Worlding Conscious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Embodied and Entangled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Reconceptualising Metacognition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 A Posthumanist ZPD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Re-Use, Re-Cycle, Relate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67 69 71 78 78 81 82 82 84

5 Fantasy Beyond the Corner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 5.1 Reality and Fantasy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 5.2 Creating Provocations, Inviting Perplexity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 5.3 Becoming Child . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93 5.4 Learning as Desiring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102 6 Writing with the Park . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.1 Dancing with Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 Re-turning with Marla and Paper: The Marla Paper Assemblage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Refrain: Cutting Together-Apart—Otherwise/Again . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

105 107 110 119 120

7 B(e)aring Wit(h)ness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.1 A Haunting Ontology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.2 Movements, Traces and Sedimentations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.3 Learning with Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7.4 Travel-Hopping/Queering Time and Space/Doing My Homework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

121 123 125 126 131 133

8 The Art of Learning with Trees . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.1 Thinking with Time, Space and Matter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.2 Fees Must Fall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.3 Park Space as Learning Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.4 Scales of Entanglement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.5 Counting Costs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8.6 Third Teacher, Third Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135 135 138 139 141 142 147 149

9 Public Places as Learning Spaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.1 Ways to Shine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.2 Major and Minor Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 Inner-City Artivism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.4 A Tale of Two Entangled Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.5 Becoming a Place-Based Public . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

151 152 156 158 161 164

Contents

9.6 Post-apartheid Democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.7 Reworking the Equations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.8 Direct Democracy and Early Childhood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9.9 Carrying on Carefully . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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165 167 169 173 174

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4 Fig. 1.5 Fig. 1.6 Fig. 1.7 Fig. 1.8 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8

Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11

Fig. 3.12 Fig. 4.1

The little tree we love . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Leaf and bee drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Andile thinks through drawing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mpho’s bottlebrush flower . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The big tree, little tree, the park table, a bee and a tap for watering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Clay bee construction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Big tree, little tree, bee and the man who sweeps the park . . . . . . Durban, April 1961. Anonymous beach photographer. Author’s collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bite-marks on leaves on a tree near the daycare centre . . . . . . . . Contagious pink/orange leaf lips. The shape and colour of leaves in a forest give Mbali an idea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . We share the contagion and it extends beyond the day in the forest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Collecting winged seeds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Choreography of mulberry mo(ve)ments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Seeds do not grow in the same day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A view, through the security gate, of children posing to be drawn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alina’s graduation display including orange bag dolls, children’s drawings, activity cards, caterpillars and beads for threading . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A picture book made by a Grade R child displayed by her teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A mini-town made from boxes, toilet rolls and bottle tops by a graduating teacher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A discarded roll of fax paper suggested the possibility of a pair of wings. ‘All I need is a piece of string. You wait and see!’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camera-eating monster . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three children sort through a pile of their peers’ work . . . . . . . .

7 8 9 9 10 11 11 15 40 41 41 44 44 45 46

49 50 50

52 62 72 xvii

xviii

Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7 Fig. 4.8 Fig. 4.9 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2

Fig. 5.3 Fig. 5.4 Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10 Fig. 5.11 Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14 Fig. 5.15

Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 6.8 Fig. 6.9 Fig. 6.10 Fig. 6.11 Fig. 6.12

List of Figures

Koketso is in control of the game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thulani dips in and out of the sorting game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . This is Thulani’s page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Spring clothes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The fire fighter is holding a hose pipe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Matches and a candle are a warning about the dangers of playing with fire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A drawing of a person with very long hair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Filing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A rocket on its way to the moon is added to the research field notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A mermaid drawing made with fluency and ease fills the page of my notebook. I had made a photograph of the two images before I lost the notebook to wily thieves who removed my backpack from a locked car . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A mermaid constructed from bottle brush flower, leaves and a spherical seed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mbali and Thulani mount their horses. Thulani is happy that at last his horse matches his blue hair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Friends holding hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A muddle of bodies, paper, light, a floor and a ceiling . . . . . . . . . Shadows, refractions and rainbows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The work with shadows and light continues through ‘playtime’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A caterpillar with rainbow edges appears on the wall . . . . . . . . . The emojis on the wall express a heightened level of affect . . . . A drawing leaves its page . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shadow fairy story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Thulani’s population of mermaids, fairies and fairy teachers . . . . Thulani and Mbali’s crowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mbali’s very different style of doll on the left, made in response to her friend’s creations. The mermaid on the right was made by Thulani . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Handstand with froggy shadow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Blurry leg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hoodie cartwheel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rolling down/with a grassy slope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chasing paper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing playground . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Paper pen friends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing on a leaf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Packaging as writing surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Duck duck goose matters less . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Park table holding hands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Table as writing surface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

72 73 74 75 75 76 77 79 89

90 91 91 94 95 95 96 96 97 98 98 99 100

101 108 108 109 109 111 111 112 112 113 113 114 115

List of Figures

Fig. 6.13 Fig. 6.14 Fig. 6.15 Fig. 6.16 Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6

Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3 Fig. 8.4 Fig. 8.5 Fig. 9.1

Fig. 9.2

Fig. 9.3

Fig. 9.4

Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 9.7

Writing in the sand . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Drawing a girl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dancing with the park 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dancing with the park 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cleaners (Transvaal Garment Workers Union) marching for higher wages. William Matlala, 1994. Photograph courtesy of the artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inner-city park. Gideon Mendel, 1985. Photograph courtesy of the artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tree with bum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tree and person, bum to bum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Researcher’s drawing from the photograph, Tausa, by Bob Gosani, 1954. Held in Bailey’s African History Archives . . . . . . Thinking with park, body, tree, pass laws and photography: Tausa tree diffraction. Photo collaboration with Maurice Smithers and Mitra Maki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The public park as thoroughfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Footprint, by Georges Senga, 2009. Photograph courtesy of the artist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Marks and traces left by the human and nonhuman participants in pedagogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grass, clover and ants. Busy ants carry a piece of mielie pap to their underground home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Small tree cut down . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #ArtMyBrixton exhibition at the Region B Open Streets, 2019 showing project work done in local schools. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentatary Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Installation of children’s proposed street furniture as part of Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Alternative traffic light design created by participants children’s workshops for #ArtMyBrixton exhibition and activation station at the Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew . . . . #ArtMyBrixton exhibition and activation station at the Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lassie and his pack of creative movement and art activating materials. Photograph courtesy of Deyana Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . Uncle Lassie playing a make-believe game with a group of children. Photograph courtesy of Lassie Ndalela . . . . . . . . . . . The artist delivers cabbages. Photograph courtesy of Lassie Ndalela . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xix

117 117 118 118

122 123 127 127 129

133 136 137 137 138 144

159

160

161

162 171 172 172

Chapter 1

Setting off

One ventures from home on the thread of a tune Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 363

Abstract This book is an account of a piece of educational research carried out with a group of five-year-olds and their teacher in 2015 in an inner-city preschool in Johannesburg. In the five years since then, many things have changed, and notably, the unavoidable reality of climate change and the planetary crisis have become increasingly pressing but also eerily reminiscent of older stories of extinction, calamity, devastation and loss. The author’s awareness of these calamities, both cosmic and human-made, grew through her engagement with this research and its connection with her focus on childhood percolated through as the data came into being.

If you fly over Johannesburg you will not easily locate its edges. To the north it is creeping towards neighbouring Pretoria, and to the south it is heading towards the Vaal river and its nest of tiny towns. It is already merged with Ekurhuleni to the east and Krugersdorp to the west. Almost one megacity, this conglomeration of human habitation has a combined population of well over 13 million people. For the first time in the history of the planet, more than half of the world’s population now live in cities. More than a quarter of South Africans live in the tiny province of Gauteng in which Johannesburg is located. Joburg is both a high-rise, urban, industrial hub and a sprawling slum, drawing migrants from both within and without South Africa’s borders. It is a meeting place of difference and different stories. One story is that urbanisation is a triumph for people gaining access to better services and a more comfortable way of life. Another is that this ‘modern’ electrified and fast-food lifestyle is in fact a very real threat to our continued survival as a species. Yet another story is the one that tells of ingenious escapes, the crossing of crocodile infested rivers and the forging of papers. What sense do we make of this multiplicity of worlds that are all part of one? So many stories and all entangled.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_1

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2

1 Setting off

With an increased urban population come a population of urban children. This book is an account of a piece of educational research I carried out with a group of fiveyear-olds and their teacher in 2015 in an inner-city preschool in Johannesburg. In the five years since then, many things have changed, and notably, the unavoidable reality of climate change and the planetary crisis have become increasingly pressing but also eerily reminiscent of older stories of extinction, calamity, devastation and loss. My own awareness of these calamities, both cosmic and human-made, grew through my engagement with this research. How it connects with my focus on childhood percolated through as the data came into being. Starting out from my home in art and arts education I had recently begun to explore the life skills curriculum in early years education. A ‘subject’ that includes everything ‘other’ than literacy instruction and mathematics, life skills is the ‘life’ of the curriculum, offering opportunities for exploration, enquiry and experimentation. This is where the arts are incorporated together with science, social science, physical education and ‘personal and social wellbeing’. The curriculum document for Foundation Phase (6–9-year-olds) states that life skills is a ‘cross cutting subject that should support and strengthen the teaching of other core Foundation Phase subjects namely Languages (Home and First Additional) and Mathematics’ (Department of Basic Education 2011, p. 8).1 I went about finding what children bring to their learning as thinkers working as they do at this age at the threshold of oracy and other-thanlinguistic forms of expression, communication and knowledge-making. After a small pilot study, I knew that a research practice built on words alone would not do justice to the kind of knowledge-making I saw happening. Children responded in multi-modal and multi-sensory ways to the daily encounters they had with the people, things, creatures and events in their learning spaces. I moved from a practice of ethnographic writing to a more active ‘making of data’ through documenting (events, things, art, objects made by children, conversations), photographing and video-recording.

1.1 Creating Research A move away from language-based research methodologies characterises a growing body of arts-based education research and early childhood research in particular (Kind 2013; Springgay and Rotas 2015; Truman and Springgay 2015; Knight 2016; Kuby 2017). My own interest in artful and emergent curricula in early years contexts and the search for appropriate ways to research them introduced me to a community of ‘post-qualitative’ researchers whose work crosses boundaries between disciplines (the sciences and the arts) and between research, pedagogy and philosophy. Creativity, chance, imagination and perplexity are recognised as central to 1 In

an apparent undermining of the cross cutting potential of the subject, time allocations are prescribed: Life skills is allocated 6 h per week for Grade R to 2 and covers the areas framed as: beginning knowledge; creative arts ; physical education and personal and social wellbeing. Language learning is given 10 h per week and mathematics 7 h.

1.1 Creating Research

3

the production of knowledge. ‘Research-creation’ brings together artistic practices and academic theory and research. Enlivening enquiry through active collaborative engagements of making and performing, research becomes more than interpretation or description. Feminist physicist philosopher, Karen Barad introduced a ‘diffractive methodology’ in her ground-breaking book, Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. It enables a move beyond ‘the familiar habits and seductions of representationalism’ (Barad 2007) and became an important thinking tool in my pedagogical research. The innovative work of Lenz Taguchi (2010) in diffracting Barad’s theories with early childhood pedagogy (and with the philosophical writings of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari) to produce a posthumanist pedagogy was an important catalyst for my enquiries. Doing research differently in this way entails a number of new research practices. These include some practices that are still engaged with language and writing, but rather than looking only for what they mean, methodologies are invented to find out what the writing and the research ‘do’ in the world as part of connected assembly of research workings. Diffraction as a methodology allows for both differentiating between texts and seeing what they do in relation to and with each other (diffracting them through one another). It can include diffracting with theories and texts in the creation of research and its data, and in re-visiting and re-working it. There is no assumption that collection and analysis of research data are discrete and sequential steps. In this way, the methodology puts the researcher inside the making of the research and not outside it looking in as a distant ‘post facto’ observer or interpreter. Even when a post-qualitative researcher uses what appears to be a qualitative methodology, like interviewing, for example, they will do this differently. Rather than seeing it as a mechanism for collecting the already existing opinions of the interviewee, they will be interested in what the interview itself does as a performative apparatus, how it changes the participants and how it produces new knowledge (Jackson and Mazzei 2012). Theory and practice can meet and affect one another in post-qualitative research. In my study, the ideas of new materialist philosophers Deleuze and Guattari meet those of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway in a preschool and park in an inner-city suburb of Johannesburg and in a diffractive meeting and infecting, they produce new and unexpected stories. Other texts, theorists, research stories and ideas add to the pile and I need the skill of an earthworm to burrow into, turn over and re-work the rich compost. More than metaphor, the compost story comes from biologist, Donna Haraway, and the earthworm from Barad who both challenge human exceptionalism and puts our research practice on a par with the earth-renewing work done by our non-human counterparts in burrowing, mixing, turning, digging and sorting (Barad 2014; Haraway 2016). Researchers ‘make worlds’ as do worms. Barad and Haraway bring a Feminist-inspired ethics of relationality to the idea of ‘being’. There is no individual unattached being-in-the-world. We only know the world through our immersion in it and through our involvements are implicated with choices and results that enable ‘an unambiguous account of marks on bodies’ (Barad 2007). For Barad the world is made through connections, relations and what she

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1 Setting off

calls ‘entanglements’. Things are not what they seem until or unless they click into place within an inseparable doing-together. The ways in which space and time and matter come together create reality—and humans are a part of this, not a separate and superior ‘other’. Elements or entities do not exist prior to their entangled behaviours. We come to know the world by engaging with it and in it. Importantly, scientists are entangled, implicated and responsible parts of the apparatus of their experiments. Deleuze and Guattari’s lyrical chapter entitled 1837: Of the refrain creates the image of a child venturing out from home into a strange world as if at the beginning of time: One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Along sonorous, gestural, motor lines that mark the customary path of a child and graft themselves onto or begin to bud ‘lines of drift’ with different loops, knots, speeds, movements, gestures, and sonorities.’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 363).

A familiar rhyme or a circular walk creates a safe and generative space and allows for new openings and gradually extended boundaries. Like playing hopscotch or skipping to a song, games can provide a way of setting off and coming home. Through the laying down of lines on the page in familiar noun verb adverb adjective noun verb sequences I start to tell my tale as you begin to read. My work with a group of fiveyear-olds is the starting point and the closing of an enquiry into children and cities. In lively collusion cities and children and everything in between offer possibilities for learning and finding ways to go on living together on our piece of the planet. On each occasion the outings to the park with the children resembled a maiden voyage of sorts. Every outing was different, and the park offered new encounters and events. In their relatively brief life experience, children are likely to experience these adventures as important and memorable. The place of the park, with all its layers of history and prehistory, is ancient and has stories that tell themselves in different ways. The past is here in the present. Perhaps we can read the stories in the age of the trees, the veins of leaves, the lines of the buildings around the park? The trees mark a time of planting (the establishment of the city of Johannesburg) and a taking of ownership. The trees are exotic species marking the space as a colonised one. Some of the seeds and seedlings for the large central Joubert Park were donated by Kew Royal Botanic Gardens when the city of Johannesburg was established in 1887 (Cane 2019). This smaller suburban park is a similar marking of civilised, ordered recreational space established a short while later. As Huffman (2010) tells us, this highveld plane had few trees in the pre-colonial period, necessitating the building by its earlier inhabitants of stone enclosures rather than wooden ones. The grassland is invisible beneath the ‘urban forest’ of exotic jacarandas that line the city streets. Circles of stone enclosures are buried beneath the circles of colonial acquisition. Circles of marking and taming and re-marking continue. Children in the park dance their circles of playful endeavour, making a home together with this welcoming treed neighbour-space that they visit daily. Taking inspiration from the two feminist philosophers mentioned above, physicist Karen Barad, and biologist Donna Haraway, I wanted to find out what happens when we choose to de-centre the ‘human’ and our human-centred ideas of development

1.1 Creating Research

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and progress in the way we are in our worlds and the ways that we come to know them. What happens when we notice (as Jane Bennett suggests) that supposedly inanimate and inert matter affects us powerfully and perhaps have a kind of agency or ‘thing power’ (Bennett 2010)? De-centring the human does not mean that we turn a blind eye to injustice. A human rights agenda and the social and spatial aspects of life are part of the picture. But so are the complex ecologies that link humans, plants and animals, soil and growth and weather. So are the theories, ideas, songs and thoughts we create and share. Noticing the stories of the past and the patterns of the present can we also notice ourselves as knowers fully part of the world we are wanting to know? Can we notice the quieter parts of our shared world that have been side-lined in our obsessive rush for human progress? What difference does it make to notice that we are part of this complexity? Can this noticing make us change the way we relate and respond to our realities? A posthumanist perspective promises new and wilder ways of thinking, learning and being together in places and spaces of learning. It points to the inseparability of our daily intimate experiences from our wider geographical and historical realities. Recognising this connectedness, I know the power of the disruptions we can make to learning-as-usual and how they can reverberate beyond the classroom. No one makes these disruptions alone. We conspire with our human and more-than-human companions: children, teachers, park space, ants, bees, flowers and weather to achieve more authentic life worlds. These are small gestures of hope that will contaminate, compound, and compost into a hot and generative catalyst that can bubble from below (Haraway 2015).

1.2 A Neighbourhood Crèche Siyakhula Daycare Centre is one of the thousands of independently run early childhood institutions across the country that offer a vital service to children and their families. It is situated in an inner-city suburb that prior to 1994 was designated ‘white’, so it has a number of facilities that most ‘townships’ do not, like a public swimming pool, library and park. This inner-city neighbourhood’s population, up until 1994, was 90% white due to the apartheid law known as the Group Areas Act which allowed only those classified as ‘white’ to own or rent property in the area. The movement of ‘black’2 people in the area would have been controlled through a number of other laws relating to their movement and employment. Now, twenty years later, the area’s residents are 90% ‘black’ and the suburb is home to an increasingly diverse community of people from different parts of South Africa as well as from

2 In

South Africa the term ‘black’ has a history as a category of classification under Apartheid, in which black Africans were separated from ‘whites’, mixed-race ‘coloureds’, and ‘Indians’. Its current usage, with a capital ‘B’ is often a politically charged term and owes much of its power to the Black Consciousness Movement. It works as a boundary-making concept alongside a theorisation of ‘whiteness’ (Mangcu, 2016).

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1 Setting off

numerous African and other countries. This is an example of post-apartheid urban South Africa where one could say that white space has been decolonised.3 The daycare centre is housed in a municipally owned pre-fabricated structure for which it pays a nominal rental. Unlike the majority of sole trader-run ECD sites in the area, Siyakhula is a community-based crèche which means that staff are hired by a management committee rather than a private owner. The management committee serves voluntarily as is the case with most non-government organisations. The management committee that also functions as its board of trustees includes the founder of the centre as well as one of the former teachers, Zinhle, who currently teaches Grade R in a state-run primary school. The state does not directly provide early childhood education and care but rather offers a range of subsidies and support programmes to private and community-based centres as long as they can show that they have complied with the requirements for official registration with the National Department of Social Development. This centre makes use of provincial government and municipal services including a Department of Health nutrition scheme that provides two meals a day for the children. The original founders of the daycare centre were two health care professionals, Thuli, a speech and hearing therapist and educational psychologist, and Rose, a stateregistered nurse and the mother of a child with a ‘disability’. Thuli was working as a speech and hearing therapist at the Johannesburg General Hospital (now called the Charlotte Maxeke Hospital). Some of her patients were children with disabilities whose parents were struggling to find daycare facilities that were prepared to take their children. In direct response to this situation, she and Rose formed a not-for-profit organisation and established the Siyakhula Daycare Centre. It opened in 1994. In the telling of the story of the crèche, I have retained the pseudonyms used in my initial writing of this research in compliance with the conditions of its creation in 2015. Only in the final chapter of this book, do I name actual people, places and partnerships. These are important intra-connections and hopeful openings to on-going relationships and possibilities.

1.3 Beyond Words On a visit to the park, a small group of children discovered a small tree sapling growing at the base of a large plane tree. ‘We love it!’ they said. They wanted their picture taken with it and posed alongside it (Fig. 1.1). The trope of babies and small creatures is strong for the children who immediately identified this tree as small like them and deserving of love and attention. A ripple of excitement spread through the huddle and drew other children into it. The children’s response to the small tree initially seemed exaggerated in my possibly jaded view of things. I should admit that I felt I was indulging yet another example of the common tendency to ‘cutify’ anything small and baby-like. But their insistence 3 On the whole, land use and demographics show unchanged apartheid spatial patterns (South African

Government, 2011, p. 260).

1.3 Beyond Words

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Fig. 1.1 The little tree we love

on stopping our walk to photograph the sprig and take turns in standing next to it made me look a little closer. I was soon drawn into their fan club. I had to marvel at the tiny tree’s glowing green shininess emerging as it was from very dry dusty red earth. I began to wonder about how trees renew themselves. I knew that if trees are cut down, they can re-grow from the stumps. I also know that seeds fall and germinate to create new trees. What was happening here? Was this a common occurrence—that a new shoot sprouts out from the base of a mature tree? I had more to learn about trees. On our way back to the centre, we stopped to look at a bottlebrush tree that was in bloom. I reached up to touch one of the spikey red brushes. A sharp pain shot through my finger and I shrieked. A bee had stung me! On returning to the centre, the children were invited to make drawings and clay constructions about what they had experienced in the park (Figs. 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7). The children depicted swings, the jungle gym, leaves, flowers, people and the bee that stung my finger. Some children used the drawing to think with. In Fig. 1.3, Andile thinks through drawing, trying out different possible geometrical branchings and leaf arrangements. The small tree we encountered featured prominently in a number of children’s drawings (for example, Figs. 1.5 and 1.7) and in the conversations that followed.

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Fig. 1.2 Leaf and bee drawing

Eloquently recruiting a range of modes of expression, the children use what Loris Malaguzzi and his fellow educators from the city of Reggio Emilia called the ‘hundred languages of children’.4 Rather than taking a solely language-based approach to knowledge-making and knowing, the educators inspired by this approach follow and

4 The

Hundred Languages of Children was the title of a poem written by Loris Malaguzzi. It is also the title of the first ‘Reggio’ international exhibition that went on tour in 1981 and thirty years later is still travelling. It is also the title of a book of essays first published in 1993 by the municipal company, Reggio Children, in collaboration with the North American Reggio Emilia Alliance, now in its third edition (Gandini 2012). An English translation of the poem is accessible at: www.inn ovativeteacherproject.org/reggio/poem.php

1.3 Beyond Words Fig. 1.3 Andile thinks through drawing

Fig. 1.4 Mpho’s bottlebrush flower

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Fig. 1.5 The big tree, little tree, the park table, a bee and a tap for watering

support the multi-sensory work of children who tend to recruit from the environment whatever is most appropriate and effective for their purpose. Given the chance, children constantly switch between modes and expressive ‘languages’ until they are schooled into using the one dominant, acceptable one—the written, verbal language of schooling. The term ‘languages’ could be taken as a rather functionalist humancentred ‘tool’ for communication. But we know that Reggio Emilia artist/educator Vea Vecchi (2010, p. 9) refers to them as ‘poetic languages’ and that they are linked to an aesthetic sense ‘fed by empathy, and intense relationships with things’ (Dahlberg and Moss, xix). These ‘languages’ depend on porous bodies connecting with the world and being changed by it. Matter is not passive and inert in this way of being in the world (Bennett 2010). As a concept, this aesthetic sense is close to what Haraway calls a ‘worlding-with’ (Haraway 2016, p. 58). It is a thinking-with and a storying-with. ‘It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories’ (Haraway 2016, p. 35). Matter matters.

1.3 Beyond Words

Fig. 1.6 Clay bee construction

Fig. 1.7 Big tree, little tree, bee and the man who sweeps the park

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1.4 Making Worlds The Zapatista movement in Mexico help us to think a multiplicity of worlds. Their notion of the ‘pluriverse’ acknowledges the existence of multiple ‘epistemic worlds’ and it is a concept that has been taken up by activists and scholars globally (Sundberg 2014). The Zapatistas invite others to walk with their movement by, on the one hand, aligning themselves with the political struggles against colonialism, while on the other, to commit to one’s own learning about multiplicity. To walk and talk our worlds into ‘being differently’ is one way of describing the work of this book. It is an exploration, with a preschool community in inner-city Johannesburg, into possible pedagogies for and with damaged colonial places through a walking with childhood. Argentinian philosopher, Walter Kohan, theorises childhood and education through his on-going practice of doing philosophical enquiries with children. His is a postdevelopmental philosophy in which childhood is both a chronological stage in life and also the ‘strength, force or intensity’ that childhood experiences at any age (Kohan 2015, p. 57). Rather than inviting children into the superior adult thought-practice of rational philosophy, he has a more radical proposition. He asks how philosophy itself can be challenged through the welcoming in of children and their thinking and a ‘different form of reason and knowledge’ (Murris 2017). My research puts to work pedagogical ideas from two contemporary educational movements: Reggio Emilia, which is mentioned above, and Philosophy for Children (P4C). They are not systems that function as instructional models of practice to follow but they offer ways of framing learning as relational and emergent in a field too long dominated by a single story of predictable individual growth and development. The two pedagogical approaches functioned in the research as two partial and connected apparatuses that helped to track the unfolding patterns of learning among this group of children. There was an obvious difference in the ways that the children and I responded to the park on that spring morning. Our difference was not so much about our relative ages or even our opposite roles of teacher and learner. It was more about a capacity to be affected by the encounter with the small tree, to stop following a pre-planned schedule, and to be able to become ‘different’ as a result. Some of us need to be stung before we wake to the moment. Younger and smaller people’s superior ability to ‘be in the present’ is familiar but what is important to my on-going account is the idea of difference and change within or ‘becoming different’. Barad differentiates between these two different conceptions of difference: first, a ‘difference as apartheid’ type in which defined identities and characteristics are used to name and separate ‘the Other’ (Barad 2014, p. 170). The second type of difference is a ‘becoming different’ in oneself in relation. Talking as a physicist, on the behaviour of waves, Barad says: ‘It is where they interfere or overlap that the waves change in themselves in intra-action and create an interference pattern or “superposition ”’ (Barad 2007). Difference and becoming are central themes in Deleuze and Guattari’s Spinozist conception of the world as a ‘plane of immanence’: a ground on which the world emerges ‘as thought

1.4 Making Worlds

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and as nature’. Events and concepts form from an infinite range of virtual possibilities. Everything is in flux and a state of becoming (Spindler 2010, p. 155). In a previous life (as an NGO co-operant) I walked into the world of earlyyears education. The non-government organisation that I joined in 2003 had been established in the 1980s to promote arts education for young children in the townships of Johannesburg. The founder of the Curriculum Development Project (CDP), the late Charlotte Schaer, took an activist stance in relation to the rights of children as artists and was deeply aware of the injustice of Bantu Education which denied black children any form of creative education. She worked closely with community-based artist educators who were part of the united mass democratic movement opposing apartheid. She was deeply inspired by the work of the municipality of Reggio Emilia and used ‘documentation’ as an advocacy tool. There were very few documents or funding proposals that went out from her office without some compelling image and accompanying text showing artworks, children and adults enthralled in making things, or rows of re-cycled containers with colour-coordinated waste items or dyed wood shavings. The CDP received on-going financial and organisational support from international funders including the Flemish government, and the Swedish funder, SIDA, before and after the new democratic government was established. The close partnership between Schaer and artist educator Lindi Solomon, produced two artfacilitation manuals: Khula Udweba and Creative Beginnings5 that have become classic texts for art educators working with children in South Africa. By the early 2000s, the current early childhood development practitioner training model was in place, although it has gone through some modifications in the interim. Short courses accredited by the South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) were on offer ranging from a level one basic entry-level training to a level four (not quite the equivalent of a matric level). An elective offered as part of the basic level four Early Childhood Development (ECD) qualification was called ‘Art in ECD’. It was worth only 8 points out of the total 140 of the full qualification and was optional amongst a range of elective courses. Despite this, the Curriculum Development Project (CDP) ran their Art in ECD elective on funder support and offered a full three-month (one day a week) intensive and experiential creative arts course for ECD practitioners. Their belief was that if practitioners experienced what art and art-making was about and got a sense of their own creativity they would be able to see learning in a new way—in a way that valued the creativity and intelligence of children-making-worlds. The CDP continues this work and so do a number of arts-focused non-governmental organisations, supported by funders who appreciate the value of working beyond the requirements of the official system of accreditation. The Johannesburg metropolis is a place that makes it easy to appreciate the inseparability of colonial/apartheid histories, environmental damage, planetary crises and exclusions of the less-than-human. The on-going marginalisation and exploitation of the majority of people through systems of ownership, dispossession, inheritance and disinheritance accompany the destruction of ecosystems, diversity and natures. The 5 Well

into its third decade of operation, the CDP continues to work in the area of art in ECD with economic empowerment projects for women as a parallel strand.

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mining histories of the Witwatersrand have produced an environmental catastrophe. Collusion between government and mining companies over decades has meant that the health and safety of people, other living things and the rehabilitation of land have been neglected. Struggles for social justice that ignore ecological precarities are misdirected and incomplete. And ecological solutions that leave global intra-human inequalities unshaken are no better. What might be less obvious is the relationship between these co-constituting calamities and our approaches towards childhood and education. I take up Haraway’s suggestion that perhaps ‘reconciliation or restoration’ is not possible, nor even desirable. She opts for the ‘more modest possibilities of potential recuperation and getting on together. Call that staying with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016, p. 10). Together with Tsing et al. (2017), she has hope in plucky weeds making their way among blighted ruins. Going on from this opening chapter, which is my invitation to you as a reader, Chapter two provides some contextual details of the policy environment in which I am working. It outlines some of the key challenges facing early childhood education in South Africa and makes an appeal for a more ethically motivated response to them. A relational ethics highlights the realities at play and puts technical concerns of provision into a broader perspective. The chapter performs an important task in the sequencing of the book’s narrative, as a number of concepts like humanism, nature and the Anthropocene need to be unpacked before going any further. Chapter three explores the centrally important issue of art and visual/material ‘making’ as a way of thinking with the world, in early years education, but also in research. The three chapters that follow are pedagogical narratives that focus on learning as an emergent phenomenon. Children go about their important work of learning-with: learning with each other in collaboration, but also with non-human, animate and inanimate companions. Empathy and responsiveness are catalysts, and as a deeply implicated researcher, my learning becomes an integral part of the story. Trees and earth are the main protagonists in Chapters seven and eight and move the pedagogical performances along at a heightened pace and intensity. In the last chapter, I attempt to consider some implications of ‘staying with the trouble’ and what hope remains among the ruins. I include a photograph of my younger self at the age of about a year because I think it adds to the textual sense-making that writing performs (Fig. 1.8). It adds a bodily form to Kohan’s idea of childhood as a force or intensity and also goes beyond notions of identity and into the performative and relational expression of the possibilities of an open-ended beginning that is childhood. An intrepid pushchair philosopher risks herself against the constraints of confinement and control to assert a more-than-social interest in the world. Childhood is an opening to difference and possibility, and perhaps we can see childhood as a balancing act on a moving vehicle. The encountering of surprising new realities, sights, sounds, language, meaning, a bombardment of sensation, visceral response and novelty are welcome challenges (especially when supported by an appreciative audience). The childhood pedagogies in the pages ahead feature children as co-producers of knowledge, that is, children as pedagogues as well as researchers. The pedagogical narratives offer stories from the South, both settler and indigenous, local and migrant; these are hybrid assemblages

1.4 Making Worlds

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Fig. 1.8 Durban, April 1961. Anonymous beach photographer. Author’s collection

of difference becoming different, both a being and becoming child. As writer, my performance is as researcher-artivist, pedagogical experimenter, woman-child and pushchair philosopher, commoning with children: thinking, feeling, making, doing, making different kinds of spaces, always making worlds. Their teacher and I trust the intelligence that the assemblages of children and their environments create. In a local preschool and park, life skills works as a strategy for living well with the planet. We joined the children as they responded to human, animal, plant and weather cycles and seasons, looking for ways to articulate experience and share our learning. Environmental education needs to be at the heart of life skills education in the South African Foundation Phase curriculum, but only through a de-centring of ‘child’ in favour of posthumanist and post-anthropocentric ‘world-ing’ which will enable a powerful multi- and transdisciplinary enquiry-led pedagogy to emerge. My years of work in art education, and more specifically in the area of art in early childhood, as well as my precarious implicated subjectivity as the inheritor of colonial privilege and displacement, has forged my particular ‘take’ on things. I have and have had a number of different but related roles as a teacher in higher education, as an activist in the non-government sector, as an artist/maker of things, as a researcher and as a resident of an inner-city suburb. Through these activities I am in an on-going search for a way to participate and contribute to the way things are and can be. Fikile Nxumalo’s (2016) use of Donna Haraway’s notion of a ‘refigured’ modest witnessing is a generative way for me to think about my engagement with my surroundings. Haraway conjures the figure of this witness to counter the ‘clinical’ independent

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and rational scientific researcher. This refigured kind of witnessing requires a close listening and an empathetic ‘being and becoming with’ others in everyday pedagogical events. This modest witness is ‘suspicious, implicated, knowing, ignorant, worried, and hopeful’ (Haraway 1997, p. 3). Resisting the ‘one-world’ language of ‘transformation’ and ‘liberation’ that define desired end points, it is necessary to speak of finding ways to (not)belong and be (dis)connected.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Bennet, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cane, J. (2019). Civilising grass: the art of the lawn on the South African highveld. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980). Department of Basic Education. (2011). Curriculum and assessment policy statement, Grades R-3, life skills. Pretoria: Department of Basic Education. Gandini, L. (2012). History, ideas, and basic principles. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini, & G. Forman (Eds.), The hundred languages of children: the Reggio Emilia experience in transformation (3rd ed., pp. 27–71). Oxford: Praeger and Reggio Children. Haraway, D. (1997) Modest−Witness@ Second−Millennium. FemaleMan−Meets−OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Psychology Press. Haraway, D. (2015) Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene : Making kinEnvironmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Huffman, T.N. (2010). Prehistory: Pre-colonial farmers. SA History online. http://www.sahistory. org.za/article/prehistory-pre-colonial-farmers-gauteng Jackson, A. Y., & Mazzei, L. A. (2012). Thinking with Theory in Qualitative Research: Viewing Data Across Multiple Perspectives. New York: Routledge. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.427. Knight, L. (2016). Playgrounds as sites of radical encounters : Mapping material, affective, spatial, and pedagogical collisions. Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (pp. 13–28). New York: Peter Lang. Kohan, W. (2015). Childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship, childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship. London: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315765778. Kuby, C. R. (2017). Why a paradigm shift of “more than human ontologies” is needed: putting to work poststructural and posthuman theories in writers’ studio. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Routledge, 30(9), 877–896. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017. 1336803. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge.

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Mangcu, X. (2016). Decolonising South African sociology. Du Bois Review, 13(1), 45–59. https:// doi.org/10.1017/S1742058X16000072 Murris, K. (2017). Reading Two Rhizomatic Pedagogies diffractively through one another: A Reggio inspired philosophy with Children for the post developmental child. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Routledge, 25(4), 531–550. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681. Nxumalo, F. (2016). Storying practices of witnessing: Refiguring quality in everyday pedagogical encounters. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 17(1), 39–53. https://doi.org/10.1177/146 3949115627898. Spindler, F. (2010) Gilles Deleuze: A philosophy of immanence. In J. Bornemark, R. Hans (Eds.), Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers. Huddinge: Sörder tön University. Springgay, S., & Rotas, N. (2015). How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Routledge, 28(5), 552–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014. 933913. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067. Truman, S. E. and Springgay, S. (2015) ‘The primacy of movement in research-creation: New materialist approaches to art research and pedagogy.’, in Art’s Teachings, Teaching’s Art. Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 151–162. Tsing, A. L., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., & Swanson, H. A. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and potential of ateliers in early childhood education. London: Routledge.

Chapter 2

Owning Up

Who designs the entrance exam for humanity? Gert Biesta, 1998, p. 11 Everybody knows that the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed, Everybody knows that the war is over, everybody knows that the good guys lost, Everybody knows the fight was fixed, the poor stay poor, the rich get rich, That’s how it goes, everybody knows. Leonard Cohen, 1988

Abstract In the post-post-apartheid period, when the reality of on-going and increasing inequality became unmistakeable, a common sentiment was: ‘At least under apartheid, we knew who the enemy was!’. Sadly, the opposite is true. The achievement of a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist society came at the expense of on-going participation in the heavily skewed global capitalist market system. The obvious travesty of a white minority government was gone, but the extraction continued: extraction at the expense of the required investment in social infrastructure. Persistent inequalities and desperate contestations over resources have an impact on the troubled world of the crèche community. This is the focus of this chapter.

In the post-post-apartheid period, when the reality of on-going and increasing inequality became unmistakeable, a common sentiment was: ‘At least under apartheid, we knew who the enemy was!’. Sadly, the opposite is true. The achievement of a democratic, non-racial, non-sexist society came at the expense of on-going participation in the heavily skewed global capitalist market system. The obvious travesty of a white minority government was gone, but the extraction continued. This ‘enemy’ is much harder to pin down. Corporate ownership of mines, and the shifting of stocks into foreign and off-shore havens continued and undermined the re-building of a country whose resources had been systematically extracted over centuries. The ‘war’ is not quite over, but its reach is total. Even the wealthy nations are now impacted by the effects of irresponsible exploitation of the earth and mindless consumerist living. Colonial backyards are encroaching onto the front lawn. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_2

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2.1 (Un) Ethical Encounters The lively and friendly woman I could see across the room was familiar to me, but I couldn’t place her. I felt that I had known her well in some other forgotten context. I was attending the seventieth birthday of a friend, Nora, whom I had met about fifteen years earlier through a political party branch (The African National Congress, the governing party that had won victory in the first democratic elections in South Africa). We had sung together in a branch choir (singing mainly struggle songs) which had then become a community choir with an expanded repertoire. Now Nora had retired from her job in a women’s empowerment organisation and was battling with an eye problem that had left her partially sighted. She was a ‘salt of the earth’ type and had lots of close women friends. Our mutual loyalty to the political party had waned and complexified since factionalism and corrupt leadership had dominated its workings, but we still met in other forums. I greeted the familiar-looking party guest and we chatted in a larger group for a while, before formally introducing ourselves. She generously reminded me who she was. Her name was Delia and she had a long association with the local community-based crèche (Siyakhula Daycare Centre) on whose management committee I served. She had agreed to take on the management of the crèche, at a time of crisis in 2016. The whole staff had resigned over a dispute related to a fraudulent bank payment they had made to themselves. They had cleverly tricked one of the signatories into signing the withdrawal slip. Delia felt she could put things right and keep the school going. To the committee’s surprise and disappointment, she herself left after a short period, under a cloud of accusation and suspicion of financial misconduct. It was a sobering moment for me then at the party to meet a ‘villain’ from the story I had played a part in, but in such an intimate and convivial context. She assured me that she knew she had been wrong and that was why she had left so abruptly. She had just been under immense pressure due to her daughter’s needs that the temptation to ‘borrow’ the crèche’s money without asking had just been too great.

2.2 How to Steal a Crèche It is not possible to tell one story of (mis)conduct without it leading to the telling of a string of other similar incidents. My involvement with this particular daycare centre began in 2012 when one of the founders of the centre, Thuli, asked me to assist with a mediation process and dismissal of the centre’s principal who had effectively ‘hijacked’ the crèche. The principal had opened a parallel bank account in the same name as the crèche’s account and instructed parents to deposit their fees there instead of into the legitimate account. She had systematically moved equipment and toys into another site in the suburb in order to establish her own school from which she could directly benefit. Once a new team of staff were in place at Siyakhula, my role there

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was primarily to contribute to the educational programme being offered and continue with routine committee responsibilities (like assisting with parent meetings, annual general meetings, nutrition programme applications, banking etc.). Teachers were generally under-qualified, as the salaries on offer were low. Wages were paid almost entirely from the incoming fees paid by parents and the centre was committed to keeping fees low enough to be affordable to parents in this working-class suburb. Teachers with even a minimal qualification would be able to find better jobs in wealthier suburbs or in formal Grade R teaching jobs in the state schooling system. Zinhle was one such example. She had joined Siyakhula as an unqualified teacher in 1999 and had gradually managed to complete her Level 4 practitioner qualification while employed there. She took a job at a nearby primary school in 2013 where she still teaches and continues to work at improving her qualifications. A degree in education is the legal requirement for teachers employed in state schools, but in order to implement the provision of Grade R to all children, the state has employed under-qualified teachers and provided funding for them to study part-time through distance learning while on the job. As the management of Siyakhula had assisted her with fees for her initial training, she remains grateful and in return has taken a position on the crèche’s management committee. Even Zinhle features in the story of financial irregularity. She was arrested on one occasion, together with the centre’s cook, due to their involvement in a fraudulent money-lending scheme. They were both released after an overnight stay in the police station cells. Zinhle was also the person tricked into signing a withdrawal slip for an unauthorised salary payment in 2016. The narratives of irregularity, mismanagement and dishonesty were initially not part of my research narrative. They continued along an apparently parallel path, seemingly unrelated to the learning programme and the experience of the children, but an unavoidable reality for which I had accepted joint responsibility as a board member.

2.3 ECD in South Africa Now Current South African policy stipulates that the Grade R or ‘reception’ year is the first year of compulsory schooling. Introduced through parliamentary process (the White paper 5 on Early Childhood Development) in 2001, access for children to this single year of preschool has increased greatly to almost full access. It is part of the first phase of formal education, or ‘Foundation Phase’, which includes Grades R to three (5–9-year-olds) but straddles both non-formal and formal systems of provision. New policies and curricula are being developed for this reception year and the earlier (birth to four) pre-grade R years and teacher education curricula are undergoing review and receiving increased attention and budget allocations. These developments take place in the context of lively contestation, both locally and globally, over conflicting theoretical and political positions. Research, policy and practice are motivated by a continuum of positions that can be seen as ranging from the most well-established, dominant approaches, through the less ‘mainstream’ to the more exploratory and

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experimental. Struggles by activists in academia and the non-government sector to steer policy frameworks away from dominant and minoritarian developmentalist standards continue (Ebrahim 2014). Patterns of inequality, lagging infrastructure provision and limited management capacity are cited as barriers to improving the lives of children and increasing their access to the benefits of our constitutional dispensation (Hall et al. 2017). Only onethird of children under five had access to formal childcare and education outside of the home (Harrison 2012, p. 1). Efforts to address ‘basic’ requirements and the extension of formal programming to the excluded majority have tended to be centralised and mainly focused on the challenge of monitoring standards of sites. Predominant concerns among non-government and community-based organisations in South Africa, as well as for ECD social workers employed by provincial governments, have been the meeting of compliance regulations for registration of early childhood education centres with Department of Social Development, rather than an exploration of pedagogical practice. The details and processes related to registration are complex and confusing, even for the officials managing the process. Registration with these organs of state opens access to a valuable range of services and subsidies, for example, the Department of Social Development (DSD) per capita subsidy; the Department of Education (DoE) Grade R teacher subsidy and the Department of Health (DoH) nutrition programme. The non-government organisation, Ilifa Labantwana, has developed the Bhalisa Inkulisa Toolkit which details all requirements and administrative processes associated ‘partial care registration’ for ECD centres. There is a considerable backlog in the allocation of subsidies and 25% of registered facilities were receiving no subsidy in 2012 when a review was carried out (Harrison 2012, p. 2). These delays and complexities have led policy advisors to promoting a more flexible and mixed form of provisioning that includes home-visits and playgroups as well as centre-based programming for under-fives (Atmore et al. 2012; Harrison 2012). Interventions like these would focus on child–adult as well as child–child interactions (Harrison 2012, p. 18). A multi-sectoral National Integrated Plan for Early Childhood Development: 2005–2010 (UNICEF 2005) was developed by government in partnership with UNICEF partners and it became policy in 2015 (Republic of South Africa 2015). The policy includes provision for programming through a range of modes and includes the deployment of fieldworkers trained as playgroup mentors (Atmore et al. 2012, p. 133). These proposals have the potential to shift focus from technical registration and compliance issues to more education-related pedagogical ones. The consideration of public spaces like community halls and parks opens up possibilities for innovative approaches to the spatial challenges related to provisioning. However, these moves to decentralisation and support for less standardised arrangements promise to be slow in coming. The same priority focus on technical issues and concern for centralised monitoring can be seen in the early childhood system in the United Kingdom, suggesting that this focus is more about choices made by political leadership than a simple issue of lack of resources, inadequate infrastructure and poverty (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, p. 133). In their insightful comparison of ECE provision in Sweden and the United Kingdom,

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Dahlberg and Moss note that in the Swedish system, the devolution of control to local municipalities with minimal regulation and assessment (the curriculum guidelines are only sixteen pages long), a free ‘entitlement’ to ECE services (paid for by taxes), and constantly improving status and equalising of working conditions for early childhood educators create the climate for the emergence of diverse and locally relevant curriculum offerings and the negotiation of pragmatic solutions to organisational challenges by community networks. In contrast, the UK system is centrally controlled and heavily regulated by national government. ECE is seen as a paid-for service or commodity, with compensatory programmes for designated groups. There is a hierarchical structure dividing early childhood workers from preschool teachers. There appear to be some parallels between the UK structure and the South African one, the most noticeable being the limited decision-making power given to childcare institutions themselves and their most direct form of government (municipalities). Readers who are interested in tracking the evolution of South African early childhood policies from the later years of the apartheid period to the present would find Eric Atmore’s ‘insider’ Ph.D. study helpful.1 In relation to the introduction of a birth to four curriculum, Harrison (2012) warns that ‘a single compulsory curriculum could stifle the creativity and diversity of programmes for early childhood development’ and draws attention to the importance of flexibility combined with better teacher/practitioner education (Harrison 2012, p. 16). The centralised and top-down management of services, while being important channels of funding and support for providers, are also examples of efforts to provide for, protect and prepare children as passive receivers of services and as not-yetcapable passengers rather than active and engaged co-creators of their worlds. The assumption underlying this text is that children are ready and willing participants in the creating of their world and their learning. A commitment to a pedagogical and research intervention of ‘being-and-becoming-with’ invites the emergence of rich learning and the possibility of different ways of knowing. This book presents a narrative in which I join a Grade R class as co-teacher, co-researcher and resident and troubled, troublesome witness. As mentioned earlier, I was drawn into the troubled world of the crèche community by one of its founders when the school faced a financial and management crisis. Apart from the dramatic events surrounding the ‘hijacking’ of the crèche in 2012, in the period since I joined the daycare centre as a committee member, management has changed three times, each time as a result of an issue of alleged theft or corruption. My decision to undertake research in the centre was partly motivated by a sense of duty towards my fellow committee members, as I knew the research project would enable me to combine my academic work with my ‘community engagement’2 and I 1 Entitled,

An interpretive analysis of the early childhood development policy trajectory on postApartheid South Africa, it is accessible on the University of Stellenbosch portal at: http://scholar. sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/105968. 2 The Council for Higher Education envisages the work of South African universities and academics as having three components: Research, teaching and community engagement http://www.che.ac. za/sites/default/files/publications/Kagisano_No_6_January2010.pdf.

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would be able to spend time in the site and be of some support to Thuli, the new and remaining staff and the children. The Grade R teacher, Alina, who was my key research partner, has siSwati and Mozambican heritage. She completed her high school education in Soweto3 achieving a matric pass but did not obtain enough points for university attendance. She worked at two other preschools as an assistant teacher prior to coming to this one as the Grade R teacher. The Grade R class was made up of twenty-nine children. Two children repeated the year (to learn English) and two left the centre for unknown reasons. At least five of the twenty-five children who completed Grade R received ‘top ten’ awards in grade one. Measuring grade one performance was not an intention of my work and no effort was made to formally follow-up on individual children. Parents and teachers that I met by chance in the year following my research gave this information unsolicited. What it confirmed was my belief in the intelligence and resourcefulness of children when allowed to learn and the skill of this very extraordinary, ‘ordinary’ teacher. Two very different narratives were playing out in the preschool: the first of these narratives was the lively agency of the children together with and in-between their surroundings (places, spaces, material and things) that sparked their thinking and their learning. The other was the complex and challenging terrain of the organisation of the ECD site and the profession of ECD practitioner.

2.4 What’s Happening in Grade R? The decision by the South African government in 2001 to focus on implementation of a compulsory state-supported school-based Grade R year to the exclusion of the birth to four age group was primarily a budgetary imperative (Biersteker 2017, pp. 24–26). Although the easiest and most cost-effective way to increase access for the majority, its proposed positioning in public schools was controversial. It was recognised by early childhood education experts as a risk in terms of a creeping formalisation of the preschool pedagogies and as ‘weakening the community-based sector’ (Biersteker 2017, p. 26). Both models prevail, as schools have not been able to offer enough places for all the Grade Rs needing to be accommodated. In terms of numbers the strategy has made significant progress. In terms of performance expectations, it has not. Most reports of the current situation on early childhood education and care consider the majority of programmes as below standard. The issue of epistemological access goes beyond ‘bums on seats’. Performance on a range of internationally coordinated tests present an image of the average South African child that is slow and far behind their global counterparts. By Grade four, performance of South African children is evaluated as having the lowest score out of sixty countries 3 Soweto

(the name being an abbreviation of South Western Township) is the oldest township of Johannesburg, established in 1930 under the Apartheid Urban Areas Act of 1923 designed to separate ‘black’ people from ‘white’. See www.sahistory.org.za.

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(Howie et al. 2017). Apart from the questions that arise about the validity of these tests for local conditions and the problems of multi- and translanguaging4 issues at play, what is most alarming is the response of policy makers to these results. The remedy for low performance in the early grades in reading and numeracy is predominantly envisaged as an increased input in formal literacy and numeracy instruction. Despite decades of early education research that shows the importance of open-ended exploratory and experimental play in the negotiation of meaning and the use of symbolic systems of representation as foundational, increased attention is paid to the later phases of early learning. Collaborative and arts-based pedagogies like those enacted by Reggio Emilia, Vivian Gussin Paley, Beth Olshansky and locally the multi-literacies work of Pippa Stein have been strongly endorsed by academic institutions like Harvard University’s Project Zero and respected educational theorists like Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, Gunther Kress and Hilary Janks. They are no longer marginal or alternative.5 Adding to existing evidence of the value of arts and multi-modal learning, my own research makes a case for learning environments to be recognised as powerful intra-active agents in the learning of children. To tell the story of this place as one that is only about clever children and happy endings would be a distortion. The troubled organisational life of the school continued in parallel with the lives and the learning of the children. My empirical research work had initially been framed as a pedagogical investigation, but in the muddy contingencies of on-site engagement, I saw how the compartmentalisation of these different parts of life and school were part of a more extensive and entrenched system that works to perpetuate the exclusion and dismissal of the children as fellow citizens and co-producers of our shared learning environment.

2.5 Politics in the Preschool The first thread in my research story is that of incidental and intra-active learning, the second is that of values and ethics. Dahlberg and Moss (2005, pp. 65–66) articulate a postmodern disillusionment with the ‘universalist ethics’ that has come to us from Kant and the European enlightenment. In this system of ethics, moral principles are based on rationality and an objective set of impartial laws that separate right from wrong. Modernist ethics follow the same trend, with the autonomous, independent, moral citizen adhering to a set of predetermined rules and principles based on rationality and objectivity. Society is seen as a contract with rights and responsibilities balanced as if in a calculation (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, p. 67). In dynamic contrast, 4 Translanguaging

is a theoretical position in language studies that disrupts notions of discrete, fixed and bounded languages used independently. Translanguaging acknowledges the porosity of language and the emergent and complex subjectivities produced through access to multiple, dynamic and mutually affecting language resources (see, for example, Makalela 2014). 5 Apart from the dedicated arts NGOs mentioned in my introduction, The Project for the Study of Alternative Education (PRAESA) is an example of an NGO that does important work in promoting reading and multi-modal and philosophical storyplay in all languages, inspired by Sara Stanley.

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postmodern ethics, strongly influenced by Feminist theory and notions of an ‘ethics of care’ (Tronto 1987, 1993; Sevenhuijsen 1998), depend on a practice of ethical judgement and choice. Each new relational situation requires a sensibility to the specifics of the ethical dilemma or decision being faced. A posthuman ethical approach is relational and responsive, but takes into account the broader, no less connected realities of the human and non-human, the living and the non-living (Barad 2007; Bennett 2010) and the dead. The notion of an encounter is put to work, but the ‘Other’ requiring respect and welcoming includes the morethan-human and the realities considered are those that may defy rational, objective analysis like the no less ‘present’ and powerful pasts and futures. Education has historically been ‘oriented by matters of practical action, not ethical action’ (Davis 2004, p. 176) and the fact that the ‘crisis’ in education is predominantly interpreted as a curriculum and public service efficacy issue (National Development Plan 2012, p. 270; Taylor 2013b, pp. 23–30) points to this long-established trend. Biesta and others argue that very often ‘evidence-based’ educational research does not question the premises on which it is carried out. The purposes and desired outcomes of education are left unexamined and the importance of values and contextual realities in education are ignored in the concern for replicability and scaling up (Sanderson 2003; Biesta 2007). The analysis offered by government research bodies of the current ‘crisis’ identify performance issues as the key problem areas not political or moral ones. Added to this, indications are that all the proposed interventions for the improvement of early childhood education provision are based on the premise of ‘developmentality’ and there is insufficient attention paid to cultural and contextual realities (Dixon 2013; Ebrahim 2014). A notable effect of the developmentalist/scientific notion of early childhood development is that it positions officials and to a lesser extent teachers and practitioners as experts in the ‘science’ of childhood and effectively excludes parents and children themselves as experts (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, pp. 164–168). The ‘child-centred’ narrative of our official curricula and related research initiatives exclude issues of co-production and decision-making from the lives and learning of children. As adults we can feel impunity with regard to our ethical choices around children. As adults we are allowed to make decisions for children and have grown complacent about our accountability to the children in our company. In our South African context, the measurement of children’s performance on international literacy and numeracy assessments seems only marginally relevant to the problems at hand. If one considers the disturbing reports about corporal punishment (Murris 2012; 2013), numbers of children not attending school at all, and other forms of societal violence like poverty, hunger (Masondo 2013) and the misuse of public funds and resources a very different set of ‘measures’ seem more appropriate. These measures would relate more to the ethical appropriateness of our responses and the flexibility of our systems than to individual children’s rating on tests. A more appropriate response to children in this context would affirm not only their cognitive and creative ability but more importantly their relational and ethical sensibility and their singularity within particular communities and categories.

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2.6 Competing Paradigms in Early Childhood Education In South Africa, the provision of education and care for the majority of the birth to four age group (and despite recent policy changes this still includes many fiveyear-olds) has, due to the history of racially determined budget allocations, been left to non-governmental organisations and the private sector. Private and communitybased sites, on achieving compliance with regulations and being officially registered with the Department of Social Development, may apply for limited support (Martin 2012). The National Planning Commission’s 2012 report recommends two years of early childhood education (prior to Grade 1). A birth to four curriculum has been developed. It may be argued that attention from the state promises at least a focused budgetary allocation and potentially a more equitable provision. This new interest in the sector is also an international trend in which increasing numbers of nation states and international development agencies are paying attention to the early childhood sector in the interests of improving social investment and ameliorating social problems (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, pp. 4–6). But on the whole, the nature of the interventions proposed are largely technical, focusing on programming towards specified decontextualised developmental outcomes (Dahlberg and Moss 2005; Ebrahim 2012). This largely English-speaking modernist western tradition which dominates policy making for early childhood education (ECE) has used observed patterns of development across a population and turned them into prescriptive standards for individual children (Burman 2000). The South African Bill of Rights in the Constitution outlines the rights of the child (Republic of South Africa 1996) and has been further developed into an act, The Children’s Act (Republic of South Africa 2005). The Children’s Act in itself will not guarantee that children’s rights are fulfilled. We increasingly rely on an active citizenry to ensure that the state is held to account and taken to task if it obstructs the expression of these rights. Two important court cases were won in 2002 and 2012, respectively, when the Treatment Action campaign (TAC) and Sect. 2.7 took government departments to court for not providing adequate services to the South African population. The first case resulted in the provision of anti-retrovirals to people diagnosed with the HIV virus (Veriava 2013) and the second with the Limpopo provinces education department having to supply overdue textbooks to schools in that province (Berger and Heywood 2010). Central government needs to be held accountable. This is an important principle in the face of the neoliberal push for privatised individualised forms of provision. But equally important is the incorporation of de-centralised local and intersecting forms of knowledge, power and decision-making. Democracies need both the major (the large scale, programmatic kind of politics) and the minor expressions of power. Local and cross-disciplinary knowledges and alliances open up ways to take us beyond what can remain a static and disabling critique of the status quo (Press and Skattebol 2007). The work of this book is to contribute to a post-developmentalist, and ‘post-age’ (Haynes and Murris 2017) discourse and the lobby of the community of early childhood educators who share concerns about the over-regulation, standardisation and

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grading of performance of children of this age group and the undermining of their creativity and intelligence. A contributor to the epistemological injustice of these ‘ranking’ practices (Dixon 2010, p. 20) is the refusal on the part of the state to acknowledge and respond to deeper contextual issues. In my post-anthropocentric pedagogical documentation, the pedagogical events I shared with the children, teacher, environments and wider contextual realities are seen as parallel and equal parts of an intra-activity of learning and a contributor to the minor politics of early childhood education. The intra-active pedagogies always already at play among children and their surroundings perform a teaching role. The ‘environment as a third teacher’ is a notion shared and put to work by proponents of the Reggio Emilia municipal preschool system (in the city of the same name). The Reggio Emilia municipal school system provides a model of reflexive (and potentially diffractive) teaching and learning and gives credit to the environment as a ‘third’ teacher complicating any dual learning partnerships between children, teachers6 and parents, and going beyond the purely human and discursive. Loris Malaguzzi, the inspirational co-founder of the Reggio Emilia system of early childhood education, introduced an innovative modification to their system in the early 1970s. In the re-envisaged programme, each municipally run preschool would have a practitioner with an arts background, (an atelierista) to work alongside the teachers. These artist/educators were invited to bring into the toddler centres and preschools, a special focus on materiality and its place in learning and getting to know the world. An open-ended exploratory attitude and an awareness of contemporary art was important—not an ‘art for children’ nor an ‘art for school’, but an artistic and philosophical attitude. Attempting to learn a post-anthropocentric theory and practice that gives the nonhuman a place in pedagogy, I recognise the historical exclusion of children from full membership of the family of the ‘human’. In a decolonising move, a posthumanist pedagogy requires taking children seriously as equal members of society and as contributors to knowledge production and capable of ethical responses and choices. The challenge I take up is to explore ways to include children in the decisions that affect their lives and learning and try to do this without portraying them as individuals disconnected from their human, nonhuman and non-living entanglements. Through direct engagement with our surroundings we get to know and make changes in the world. This was true for me as well as the children. How does learning happen when we take this into account? And how can children be welcomed into the company of city/earth dwellers so that they can contribute to the on-going negotiation of our shared futures?

6 Teachers

in the Reggio Emilia system never work as individual teachers: Malaguzzi sees ‘team’ teaching (always more than one adult with any group of children) as a safeguard against the ‘inhuman’ and ‘individualistic’ tendencies that can take hold when adults are alone with thirty children (Malaguzzi 2016, p. 223).

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2.7 Exploring Alternative Ontologies Posthumanist scholars Taylor and Hughes (2016) consider the ‘human’ as a concept to be troubled, cracked open and excavated rather than taken as the assumed foundation of our educational endeavours. They excavate the relationship between the concepts: human, humanism and humanity, and come up with three key areas of contention. First, they note that the legacy of western humanism is implicated in many of the current crises facing our existence: increasing inequality resulting in a polarisation of a small 1% of the world’s population of elites, from the majority 99%; a depletion of resources and the increasing threat of global warming. The notion of progress and the belief in the superiority of certain cultures are embedded in dominant forms of Enlightenment Humanism (Taylor 2016, p. 11) which fuelled the colonial expansion, institutionalised slavery and industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. These practices laid the foundation of current patterns of inequality and voracious extraction and inequitable exploitation of the world’s resources. I think it is also useful to add here that the ‘metabolic rift’ that Marx identified registers the change in agriculture from peasant agriculture to large plantations and monocropping that degrade the soil and alienate the worker (Foster 2000; Satgar 2018). Second, in terms of knowledge systems, patriarchal forms of rationality elevated the academy and the disciplines over other ways of knowing. Through Cartesian practices of defining, categorising, describing and objectifying, the episteme reduced and limited the possibilities of knowing and being with and in the world to a set of representational practices productive of particular subjectivities of ‘knower’. Modern, western notions of scientific progress effectively excluded the knowledges of an extended community of others: human (women, children, colonised indigenous peoples), as well as the non-human (animals, plants, minerals, and the throngs and swarms of things and forces at play in our multi/pluriverse). Feminist and queer philosophies, joining with forces with biology and anthropology, trouble many of the hard and fast distinctions made by science: between the living and non-living; plant and animal, male and female. Famously, Descartes dismissed animals as being on a par with machines, being composed of and definable as ‘matter’. Humans, on the other hand, possessed minds, a wholly different substance, and necessary for conscious thought and language—the signs of an immortal soul. Anthropocentric models of scientific thinking—Cartesian and Newtonian, place the human observer, in the words of quantum physicist, Niels Bohr, outside of ‘that nature that we seek to understand’ (Barad 2007). Among all of Descartes’ huge legacy including the connection he made between algebra and geometry, that decades later led to the invention of calculus, and the ‘sine’ law of refraction, used in the design of lenses, his notion of a bifurcated universe is the one that has profoundly influenced western thought and is itself one side of a bifurcation among philosophies: between dualist and non-dualist positions. Descartes’ younger contemporary, Baruch Spinoza, unlike the superstar that Descartes was, was unpopular, unrecognised and ‘excommunicated’ from his Jewish community. Only relatively recently has he come to be considered one of the most important

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of the seventeenth century western philosophers, Deleuze calling him ‘the prince of philosophers’. Spinoza’s non-anthropomorhic ‘God’ (or nature) is a philosophical concept of unity in existence that moves thought and knowing beyond the human brain. A third piece of evidence against humanism is the hierarchical ordering of existence that it assumes. Both classical humanism (Greek, Renaissance and Enlightenment versions of Humanism) and the deity-centred, monotheistic, text-based religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) place ‘man’ at the centre and apex of the universe—both in terms of his species and his gender. Foucault noted that the modernist conception of ‘man’ has been a relatively recent invention (from around 1800 with the shift from the classical age) and one that is unlikely to prevail. Biesta draws from Foucault to explore the reconstruction of the educational subject through a pedagogy ‘without Humanism’ (Biesta 1998, pp. 1–16), that is, without the anticipated, predetermined end result or product of the humanist subject. Snaza (2013), in a similar vein, proposes ‘bewildering education’ as a pedagogical project to refuse this stifling dead end and to open it up to something wilder. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the modern white male articulation of subjectivity as ‘the Majority subject’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 133). The hubris of humanist ontologies that give man the role of commanding the ‘uni’-verse prevents him from learning from the material and non-material forces operating in the wilding worlding world and beyond. Epistemic humility features strongly in many of the posthumanist positions taken up in the quest for a posthumanist ethics (Taylor 2016, p. 16). Just as humanism has been complex, heterogeneous and shifting, so too is posthumanism. Taylor (2016) refers to posthumanisms (plural), while Braidotti refers to ‘strands in contemporary posthuman thought’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 38). Posthumanism is not a single idea with a definable moment or beginning. Some forms of humanism had within them elements of the posthuman (consider the challenges to male-dominated western forms of knowledge and power made by the feminist movement as well as anti-colonial and anti-racist movements). As Sundberg (2014) attests, the dualism of nature/culture is not universal but rather a construct of EuroWestern ontologies. A number of indigenous and Eastern ontologies trouble for us the nature/culture, human/more-than-human binaries in that they are relational and flattened or more horizontal ontologies. These ontologies, however, cannot be summoned in a romanticised return to pre-colonial realities. They are at the centre of the contestations and dispossessions that continue to exclude their ways of knowing as well as their material claims from legitimate legal and political sanction.

2.8 A Different Kind of ‘Real’ The dualisms of nature/culture and discourse/reality do not capture the complex reciprocity and interconnectedness that make up experience. Post-structuralist notions of subjectification recognise the power of language and discourse to create subjects, not merely describe them. They challenge realist notions of the essential natures of

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child; boy; girl; woman with the claim that these are societal or cultural constructions. They posit an entirely discursive production of gender: a layer of culture added onto natural, biological, sexual difference. This is described as the linguistic turn. Posthumanist early childhood theorists see the nature/culture divide as a limiting dualism that gives language and the human position undue dominance in our understanding of the world—an understanding in which the real world gets lost (Barad 2007; Taylor 2013a; Murris 2016). The posthumanist view proposes that our biology (our physical materiality) and our culture (the social and cultural aspects of our gendered or agedefined selves) are closely entwined in our experience and sense-making. Indeed, the materiality of our biology (our blood and bone) has impacted directly on the emergence of gender and age-related practices. Posthumanism looks beyond discourse as separate from reality, material and biology, but rather in relation, dialogue, conversation with it in a process of mutual co-production. Simply put, the nature/culture binary is ‘man made’. This is not to say that reality and nature exists in a fixed and permanent state prior to any interpretation of it. Rather reality is emergent. Nature or the world emerges through particular events and intra-actions. Posthumanist thinkers working in a range of disciplines and many working against disciplinarity, try to remove, de-centre or ‘cut down to size’ the anthropocentric gaze in order to acknowledge the agency of the non-human elements in the relationships of co-production and the making of meaning. Relational materialism is one of the terms used to describe this philosophical position (Hultman and Taguchi 2010, p. 526) which makes a philosophical connection with the monism of Spinoza, the agential realism of Barad, and the ‘radical immanence’ of contemporary French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari (Braidotti 2013, p. 56). As mentioned briefly above, Barad’s ‘agential realism’ challenges the objectivity demanded by rational scientific approaches to meaning making. Her more complex version of reality is rigorously demonstrated through a careful attention to specific intra-actions of participant elements in the phenomenon under examination. In other words, realism is not about defining the fixed and recognisable identities of elements in the world, but rather recognising the production of subjectivities that exist temporarily in particular arrangements and events. As intraacting parts of a material-discursive reality, the ‘data’ that is created through my researching are not mute and passive pre-existing entities, but part of an emergent worlding phenomenon as I am.

2.9 Nature and the Human The child at the centre of mainstream official early childhood curricula is positioned as more closely connected to nature, and more ‘inherently creative’ (Department of Basic Education 2011, p. 9) than we are as adults and will go through a process of enculturation through schooling. This ‘naturalised’ nature is an inherited blend of romanticism and positivist science that frames nature as pure, nature as powerful mother, nature as the essence of things, and as the predictable reliable laws of nature (including childhood development) and everything ‘out there’.

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These natures are always other-than human, other-than culture, other-than historical and political. According to Black geographies and childhood studies scholar, Fikile Nxumalo, global conceptions and imagery of child as innocent pure nature are still predominantly reserved for white children, and this framing accompanies much of the discourse around contemporary environmental education (Nxumalo 2019, pp. 117– 118). The naturalised conception of universal ‘child’ has both nativist/evolutionary and colonial/minority world roots (Taylor 2011; Ebrahim 2012). In our era of planetary crisis, commonly named the Anthropocene, it is no longer possible to imagine that human knowledge-making mirrors reality or ‘nature’ without profoundly affecting its very existence. Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on ozone depletion, is credited for coming up with the term ‘Anthropocene’ on the spur of the moment in a meeting in 2000. This story is included in Elizabeth Kolbert’s 2019 book, The Sixth Extinction, and although the term caught on and gained currency over nearly twenty years, it has taken almost as long to get the term officially recognised by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). The last mass extinction occurred 66 million years ago and is believed to have been caused primarily by the collision between earth and a huge asteroid. Radioactive iridium from the blown-apart asteroid rock was deposited on the earth’s surface and is the marker or ‘spike’ between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. This blast wiped out the dinosaurs among other things. The sixth extinction is happening without a momentous calamity like a meteor. It is human-made. Temperature increase, land mass depletion, deforestation, ice cap melts, air and water pollution, soil degradation and ocean acidification have all contributed to creating conditions for a sixth mass extinction. According to Professor Jan Zalasiewicz, chair of the working group on the Anthropocene (WGA) that began its work in 2009, the jury is out on what will be named as the spike, but his vote goes to what he calls the ‘bomb spike’. Radioactive fallout from the use of nuclear weapons that began in 1945 and has settled on the Earth’s surface ‘like icing sugar on a sponge cake’ (Davison 2019). Donna Haraway would prefer the name of our era not to perpetuate the centring of the ‘human’ who caused all the trouble. Haraway recognises Jason Moore’s simultaneous work on the neologism of the Capitalocene (she has explored the terms Plantationocene and Capitalocene) as a more appropriate term to refer to the systems and practices that have brought on the calamity (Haraway 2015). The use of the word Anthropos could suggest that all humans have been benefitting from the gross abuse and pillaging of the earth’s bounty which is not the case. A certain section of the human species has created the machinery for planetary destruction through certain kinds of economic and industrial activity—slavery, monoculture plantations, deforestation, consumerism and nuclear proliferation. Stubblefield suggests to use a capital ‘H’ for this human (Stubblefield 2018, p. 1) to de-homogenise the term. Plantationocene and Capitalocene are still too anthropocentric in Haraway’s view. Haraway (2016) brings her love of life and biology on the one hand and speculative science fiction on the other to propose something wilder and more poetic. Calling up the powers of the underworld and subterranean and other earthly creatures, she proposes the Chthulucene (khthonios in ancient Greek means of the earth) as a ‘fierce

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reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital’ (Haraway 2016, p. 2). Her multilayered moniker marks a space–time for ‘staying with the trouble of living and dying in response-ability on a damaged earth’ (Haraway 2016, p. 2). In concert with many writers in the environmental humanities, I continue to use the term ‘Anthropocene’ as a convenient (Le Guinian) carry-bag. Most mainstream early childhood curricula exhibit a nostalgic reverence for natural processes and laws that form a part of a predominantly instructional learning programme and are also associated with the so-called development of children. Mainstream early childhood education approaches build on the legacies of Rousseau, Fröbel and Montessori, but take on strong influences from the developmentalist guidelines of Piaget and Gesell, and some softening and complexifying from the psychoanalytic orientations of Erikson, Bowlby and Winnicott (Bruce 2012; Gordon and Browne 2013). Physical, cognitive and emotional aspects of the child’s experience are identified, but the ‘child’ is present as some kind of ‘universal’ individual. The nature/culture binary produces ‘the child’ as pure, innocent, close to nature, maturing predictably and inherently creative. The ‘child as artist’ fits into this dualistic framing. Herbert Read (1948) and Victor Lowenfeld (1968) in the European post-war period celebrated the artistic impulse and the value of ‘expression’ for children while claiming a scientific basis for age appropriate expectations and achievements. Similar to Rousseau’s idea of ‘negative education’, their belief in the child’s innate expressiveness produced the notion of ‘free expression’ and the claims supporting non-intervention in art education which persist in early childhood education in many contexts. What is left out of this picture or story, is the variation and particularity of children’s social realities and their close connectedness to the people, places and experiences that make up this reality (Nsamenang 2008; Dahlberg et al. 2013), raising the obvious question about just how free is free? What often happens in mixed income groups is that the ‘free’ and exuberant use of art materials by some children is seen as wasteful irresponsibility by others. Some children need a good deal of encouragement and reassurance before they ‘help themselves’ to the materials on offer. In a posthuman pedagogy of worlding, each intra-action has the potential to change the participants, each affecting and being affected in particular ways. Through careful noticing and patient convivial co-presence the company of posthumanist feminist and new materialist-inspired pedagogues have generated the wealth of literature and shared experience that sparked so many ideas and affirmed so many decisions and choices that underpin the pedagogical storying that follows. They share common experiences of living with the ruins, the dispossession of colonial realities and the violence of schooling-as-machine. Both the Philosophy with Children and the Reggio Emilia theory-practice of early childhood education value the lived experience of participants and the learning offered by it far above any selected body of pre-existing knowledge available for transmitting from teachers to learners. As such they challenge many of the established forms of knowledge and accepted practices usually identified with their fields, namely philosophy and education, and specifically early childhood education. Academic philosophy and developmental psychology are troubled by the practices that these two

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‘nomadic’ or ‘rhizomatic’ pedagogies enact (Kuby 2016; Murris 2017). In these practices, a direct connection is made between being and knowing and knowledge comes with an ethical responsibility (Barad 2007). What this means is that the contexts and lifeworlds of learning and learners are given prominence as are the circles of community and belonging shared by participants. Threads and ties are made and un-made with the worlds of readymade knowledge but these are not where learning begins. What these approaches have in common is a commitment to collaborative learning and a deep respect for the intelligence and capability of children and increasingly, a noticing of the more-than-human aspects of educational engagements. Philosophy with Children follows concepts through enquiry and questioning and embodies a post-age pedagogy of open-ended exploration. Murris’s particular contribution to the discourse has been her diffraction of the conceptual focus of Philosophy with Children through the material-discursive practices of Reggio Emilia-inspired project work and documentation. This complexifies what is sometimes mis/interpreted as ‘another’ art-based pedagogy. What may be lost-in-translation are the chancy provocations of mindboggling7 posthumanist pedagogical landscapes. The term, diffraction, is used here, not as a metaphor, but as a reference to the behaviour of our world as it continually comes into being (not fixed as in a positivist ontology), but also as a purposeful strategy of reading of one text or discourse through another to gain new insights and knowledge. An ontology of emergence and entanglement, an epistemology of intra-active agency and an ethics of care and relationality, make visible some disturbances produced in the field of early childhood education in this inner-city suburb. Multiple discourses, including those of women’s employment and early childhood pedagogy can be read through one another and their material realities can be recognised as entangled and mutually implicated. That has been the work of this research which attempts to track intra-active pedagogical worlding to produce new knowledge about childhoods in an urban Anthropocene.

2.10 Pedagogy as Research Research-as-worlding-with is a sympoiesis. Originally proposed by one of Donna Haraway’s environmental studies students, the term extends the boundaried connotation of autopoiesis—the self-sustaining and reproducing capacity of living things. Sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with”. Nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organising. (…) Sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. It is a word for worlding-with, in company. Sympoiesis enfolds autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it. (Haraway 2016, p. 58) 7 Mindboggles

is the name given to the P4C network that Karin Murris established in both Johannesburg and Cape Town. Teachers are invited to become a part of a community of philosophical enquiry and meet monthly to practice.

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Art education scholar, Rita Irwin, in framing her research approach called a/r/tography, refers to Aristotle’s attempt to equalise the relationship between philosophy and the arts. He proposed three forms of thought: Knowing (theoria), doing (praxis), and making (poiesis). A/r/tography offers a diffraction with pedagogy that many research methodologies do not. As such it has close parallels with the project-based approach of the teachers, atelieristas and pedagogistas of Reggio Emilia and those enacting these practices in other parts of the world. The theorypractice of a/r/tography is positioned in a threshold between arts practice, education and social science research methods and values these three ways of ‘knowing, doing and making’ (Pinar 2004, p. 9; Irwin 2004, p. 27). A possible (humanist) mis/interpretation could interpret the name as a foregrounding of the person of the artist, researcher, teacher. A/r/tography pays serious attention to the agency of the material practices of various artforms in the researcher’s practice and the recognition of art as a border space between and among lives and worlds. A/r/tographers inhabit the borderlands between ‘intellect, feeling and practice’. There is a lively crosscontamination between theory and practice: ‘(t)heorising rather than theory, and practicing rather than practice, transforms the intention of theory and practice from stable abstract systems to spaces of exchange, reflexivity, and relationality found in a continuous state of movement’(Irwin 2013, p. 199). A/r/tography is one of a number of moves in the field of research methodology that looks to art making as a enactment of ‘living inquiry’ (Irwin 2013; Irwin and Springgay 2008) and a ‘making-with’ that can offer alternatives to word-based and representational research practices. So ‘pedagogy as research’ and specifically art pedagogies as research, powerfully resist a number of inherited assumptions about research, namely: the dominance of text, word and argument; the importance of representation and interpretation; and the intrinsic value of aesthetic standards and judgements.

References Atmore, E., van Niekerk, L.-J., & Ashley-Cooper, M. (2012). Challenges facing the early childhood development sector in South Africa. South African Journal of Childhood Education, 2(1), 120– 139. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajce.v2i1.25. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Berger, J. and Heywood, M. (2010) ‘The Story of the TAC case’. Biersteker, L. (2017). Scaling up early childhood development in South Africa. The Imperative of Development: The Wolfensohn Center at Brookings (p. 174). Biesta, G. (1998). Pedagogy without humanism: Foucault and the subject of education. Interchange, 29(1), 1–16. Biesta, G. (2007). Why “what works” won’t work: Evidence-based practice and the democratic deficit in educational research. Educational Theory, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.17415446.2006.00241.x. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bruce, T. (2012). Early childhood education. UK: Hachette.

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Burman, E. (2000). Method, measurement and madness. In Holzman L. & J. Morss (Eds.), Postmodern psychologies, societal practice, and political life (pp. 49–78). Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. London: Routledge. Dahlberg, G., Moss, P., & Pence, A. (2013). Beyond quality in early childhood education and care: Languages of evaluation. London: Routledge. Davis, B. (2004). Inventions of teaching: A genealogy. Mahwah, NJ/London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Davison, N. (2019). The Anthropocene epoch: Have we entered a new phase of planetary history?. The Guardian, 30 May. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Transl. Br. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Department of Basic Education. (2011). Curriculum and assessment policy statement, Grades R-3, lifeskills. Pretoria: Department of Basic Education. Dixon, K. (2010). Literacies, power, and the schooled body: Learning in time and space. London: Routledge. Dixon, K. (2013). A change of perspective: Seeing through children at the front of the classroom, to seeing children from the back of the classroom. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 273–284. Ebrahim, H. (2012). Tensions in incorporating global childhood with early childhood programs: The case of South Africa. Australian Journal of Early Childhood, 37(3), 80–86. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/183693911203700311. Ebrahim, H. B. (2014). Foregrounding silences in the South African National Early Learning Standards for birth to four years. European Early Childhood Education Research Journal, 22(1), 67–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293X.2012.738869. Foster, J. B. (2000). Marx’s ecology: Materialism and nature. New York: Monthly Review Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/3341498. Gordon, A. M., & Browne, K. W. (2013). Beginnings & beyond: Foundations in early childhood education. Cengage Learning. Hall, C., et al. (2017). South African early childhood review, Children’s Institute. Cape Town: University of Cape Town and Ilifa Labantwana. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harrison, D. (2012). Opportunities for Learning. In L. Richter et al. (Eds.), Diagnostic Review of Early Childhood Development, Pretoria. Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2017). Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Routledge, 49(10), 971–983. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 31857.2016.1255171. Howie, S. J. et al. (2017). PIRLS Literacy 2016 : South African highlights report what is PIRLS? Participation in PIRLS cycles two types of PIRLS achievement assessments questionnaires (Contextual) grade 4 PIRLS Literacy attained sample grade 4 achievement in PIRLS Literacy 2016. South African Highlights Report., 1–12. Hultman, K., & Taguchi, H. L. (2010). Challenging anthropocentric analysis of visual data: A relational materialist methodological approach to educational research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 23(5), 525–542. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2010. 500628. Irwin, R. L. (2004). Artography: A Metonymic Mettisage. In R. L. Irwin & A. de Cosson (Eds.), A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living enquiry. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press. Irwin, R. L. (2013). Becoming A/r/tography. Studies in Art Education, 54(3), 198–215. https://doi. org/10.1080/00393541.2013.11518894.

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Irwin, R. and Springgay, S. (2008) ‘A/r/tography as practice-based research. In S. Springgay et al. (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. xix–xxxiii). Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kuby, C. R. (2016). Rhizomatic possibilities for writing processes: Fluid structures and components. In R. J. Meyer & K. F. Whitmore (Eds.), Reclaiming early childhood literacies (pp. 237–246). New York: Routledge. Lowenfeld, V. (1968). Lowenfeld Speaks on art and creativity. In L. W. Brittain (Ed.), Washington, DC: National Art Education Association. Makalela, L. (2014). Fluid identity construction in language contact zones: Metacognitive reflections on Kasi-taal languaging practices. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Taylor & Francis, 17(6), 668–682. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.953774. Malaguzzi, L. (2016). Years of growth: 1970–79. In P. Cagliari, M. Castagnetti, C. Guidici, C. Rinaldi, V. Vecchi, & P. Moss (Eds.). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993. (pp. 151–272). London: Routledge. Martin, P. (2012). The role of the State: Legal obligations to provide comprehensive early childhood development services. Background paper in Richter, L., Biersteker, L., Burns, PJ, Desmond, DC, Feza, DN, Harrison, D., Martin, P. Saloojee, H., & Slemming, W. Diagnostic Review of Early Childhood Development. Pretoria: Department of Performance, Monitoring and Evaluation & Inter-Departmental Steering Committee on Early Childhood Development. Masondo, S. (2013, July 7). No money means no school. City Press. www.citypress.co.za Murris, K. (2012). Student teachers investigating the morality of corporal punishment in South Africa. Ethics and Education, 7(1), 1–14. Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing child’s voice. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 245–259. Murris, K. (2016). The Posthuman Child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718002. Murris, K. (2017). Reading Two Rhizomatic Pedagogies diffractively through one another: A reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child. Pedagogy Culture and Society, Routledge, 25(4), 531–550. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681. Nsamenang, A. B. (2008). Agency in early childhood learning and development in Cameroon. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 9(3), 211–223. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2008.9. 3.211. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. New York: Routledge. Pinar, W.F. (2004). Foreword. In R.L. Irwin, R. L & A. De Cosson (Eds.). A/r/tography: Rendering self through arts-based living inquiry. Vancouver: Pacific Educational Press. Press, F., & Skattebol, J. (2007). Early childhood activism, minor politics and resuscitating vision: A tentative foray into the Use of “Intersections” to Influence Early Childhood Policy. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 8(3), 180–191. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2007.8.3.180. Read, H. (1948). Education through art. Oxford: Pantheon. Republic of South Africa (2012). National Development Plan. Pretoria: Government Printers. Sanderson, I. (2003). Is it “what works” that matters? Evaluation and evidence-based policy-making. Research Papers in Education, 18(4), 331–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/0267152032000176846. Satgar, V. (2018). The climate crisis and systemic alternatives. In V. Satgar (Ed.), The Climate Crisis ( pp. 1–28). Wits University Press. https://doi.org/10.18772/22018020541.6. Sevenhuijsen, S. (1998). Citizenship and the ethics of care: Feminist considerations on justice, morality, and politics. Psychology Press. Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2013.783889. Stubblefield, C. (2018). Managing the planet: the anthropocene, good stewardship, and the empty promise of a solution to ecological crisis. Societies, 8(2), 38. https://doi.org/10.3390/soc8020038. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing posthumanist geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067. Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the “nature” of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0907568211404951.

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Taylor, A. (2013a). Reconfiguring the natures of childhood. New York: Routledge. Taylor, N. (2013b). NEEDU national report: The state of teaching and learning literacy in the foundation phase. Department of Basic Education, Pretoria. http://www.education.gov.za/NEEDU/ tabid/860/Default.aspx Taylor, C. A. (2016). Edu-crafting a cacophonous ecology: Posthumanist research practices for education. In C. Taylor & C. Hughes (Eds.), Posthuman research practices in education (pp. 5–24). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137453082_ch02. Taylor, C., & Hughes, C. (Eds.). (2016). Posthuman research practices in Education. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tronto, J.C. (1987). Beyond gender difference to a theory of care. Signs, 12(4), 644–663. Tronto, J. C. (1993). Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York: Psychology Press. Veriava, F. (2013) The 2012 Limpopo Textbook Crisis : A study in rightsbased advocacy, the raising of rights consciousness and governance. http://www.section27.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2013/ 10/The-2012-Limpopo-Textbook-Crisis1.pdf.

Chapter 3

Windfall

Twin rafts over chaos, philosophy and art, along with their more serious sibling, the sciences, enframe chaos, each in its own way, in order to extract something consistent, composed, immanent which it uses for its own ordering (and also deranging) resources. (Elisabeth Grosz, 2008, Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth, p 9).

Abstract Rather like a large evolving art installation, early years learning spaces can physically instantiate the centrality of children’s complex ‘thinking work’ in the broader education project going on in the classroom. The use of an artist’s gaze, as proposed by Loris Malaguzzi, is a profound shift away from the scientist’s gaze that Montessori employed, although there are parallels in their practices of observing, listening and recording of children’s responses and activities. The kind of listening required in an ethically aware pedagogy of encounter, such as that proposed by Vea Vecchi, in her account of the role of the atelierista in Reggio Emilia, coheres with the notion of a sympoietic, posthumanist experimentation as explored in this chapter.

3.1 Incidental and Intra-Active Learning Setting out for a walk in the park with the children from Siyakhula gave me a new way of understanding the concept, ‘chaos’. From day-to-day, this inner-city space was subject to the wild actions of the myriad components of that piece of earth: wind, rain, heat, cold, insects, birds, stray cats, rats, people. All of these forces constantly changed the park that would spark new experiences, thoughts, feelings and ideas. The leaves of a tree newly chomped by some or other creature invited a question about the caterpillars from a story read some days before. ‘Where do caterpillars live?’ (Fig. 3.1). Co-creating or creating-with this kind of learning environment requires planning for the unexpected—a paradoxical notion that demands continual re-thinking, returning and responding to what emerges (Barad 2014). During their years of emerging

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Fig. 3.1 Bite-marks on leaves on a tree near the daycare centre

speech and literacy, children find, make and express meaning in a range of non-verbal and verbal modes and codes. They do a great deal of learning that is not easily visible to others and can’t necessarily be articulated. This idiosyncratic and ‘incidental’ learning cannot be tracked or measured using pre-set standards and so methods of evaluation that use predetermined standards are mostly not appropriate. If this kind of learning is valued, one’s concern as an adult is not only to find ways to recognise it but more importantly to allow it to happen in the first place through the creation of conducive spaces and then to ‘make visible’ the learning being achieved. In addition, to value this kind of learning means to collectively find ways to extend, deepen and share it. Disrupting the notion of ‘child-centred’ education, child and human are both de-centred in this pedagogy in which ‘interests are treated like contagious trends and they do not reside in each individual’ (Olsson 2009, p. 71). Figures 3.2 and 3.3 show an example of a contagious interest in the shape of leaves and lips between leaf, child and adult. An idea from a forest caught and fanned a child’s fascination with symbolic representation. She recognised the leaves as having the same shape as human lips. Their colour was an additional connector. I caught the spark and throughout the day we showed each other mouths, lips and smiles that appeared to us on surfaces and

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Fig. 3.2 Contagious pink/orange leaf lips. The shape and colour of leaves in a forest give Mbali an idea Fig. 3.3 We share the contagion and it extends beyond the day in the forest

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objects, shadows and smudges. Due to the enormous power adults have in the lives of children on a daily basis, incidental learning is often a casualty of the systems, routines, plans and programmes we put in place to create order and manage large groups of children in limited spaces. The freedom to follow these ‘calls’ from one’s surroundings makes possible ‘learning as encounter’ or learning as ‘worlding-with’ already introduced in Chap. 1. Emerging from an interest in arts-based learning and the implications of a posthumanist position, my research puts to work two pedagogical contagions: Reggio Emilia and Philosophy for Children, briefly introduced in Chap. 1. They are not programmes or instructional models of practice to follow but work as waves of difference that disturb taken-for-granted expectations. The two pedagogies functioned in the research as two related apparatuses that helped to track the unfolding patterns of learning as they affected the entangled realities of children, adults, creatures, a city, a concept, a memory: all the human and other-than-human parts of a learning event, an intra-active ‘entangled phenomenon’ (Barad 2007). The research that grew into this book enacts posthumanist responsiveness to what children, adults, materials and spaces bring to the learning experience and an attention to the workings of creativity, chance, imagination and perplexity. Philosophical enquiry as seen in the Philosophy with Children approach and the progettazione of the Reggio Emilia approach are disturbances (like ripples or waves) that encounter the lifeworld of the local inner-city preschool. Rather than a Reggio Emilia-inspired intervention, or the implementation of Philosophy with Children, it is an engagement with what is ‘always already’ there: a witnessing of the resourcefulness, intelligence and creativity of a group of South African children and their non-human others. The challenging practice of the community of philosophical enquiry is the pedagogy at the heart of the approach of Philosophy for/with Children (P4C). The origins of the pedagogy stem from the pragmatist philosophies of Peirce and Dewey and it offers possibilities for foregrounding thinking together (creative, critical, caring and collaborative thinking) and ethical relationships of mutual listening. The pedagogy offered a way for me to be a different kind of teacher and learner, akin to Haraway’s mutated modest witness. I could claim a new way of being in my own skin: a position that was less fixed, more shifting and always contentious. Discomfort was expected. I could always anticipate or assume disruption and conflict. My already established relationship with the community of the Siyakhula Daycare Centre and the local neighbourhood invited the possibility for even closer engagement and an exploration of an aspect of learning whose demands for attention had become increasingly loud: the hands-on, self-directed engagement with materials and things-in-the-world. Accustomed to taking a rather narrow view of learning spaces, focusing predominantly on pedagogical issues, I was slow to engage with the other more institutional factors at play. Barad’s critical posthumanism and monist ontology nudged me into wondering how these seemingly separate stories were in fact bound up with each other’s making.

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3.2 There Are Four Seasons in the Year In the course of my research enquiry, an engagement with seeds became a major focus for the children in the Grade R group. It was partly in response to the routine curriculum theme of ‘Spring’. The seasons are present in the CAPS curriculum initially as individual topics: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter in each term of Grade R and then in Grade 2, as a broader topic of ‘seasons’. An escape from the paper world of prescribed text and worksheet immediately trouble the essentialist notion of a discrete and definable set of conditions that constitute a season. The children noticed that in fact while there were indeed fresh, new bright green spring leaves emerging, there were quite a lot of dry autumn leaves still hanging onto the trees. We talked about what would get them to fall off and shared ideas about wind. We found seeds on the ground as well, and made a collection of these, sorting them into types. The flotsam of autumn and winter would soon yield the sproutings of spring and summer. Serendipitously, the following day a strong wind did blow in. Not only did it blow off many of the dry leaves, but also from the west side of the crèche where the municipal swimming pool is situated, it blew in a multitude of winged seeds from a large tree growing in the pool garden (an alien species Tipuana from Brazil) (Fig. 3.4). These seeds provided raw material for the construction of all kinds of creatures and creations: birds, bees, aeroplanes, flowers, butterflies as well as choreographed object animations. One boy created a story told through a sequence of movements, using both of his hands and an arrangement of seeds and seed pods. It was about mulberries falling from a tree and being picked up and put into a basket (Fig. 3.5). The materials suggested ideas and motivated focused and purposeful making and storying. The idea of seeds and their rich diversity as well as their potential to grow into new and different plants entered the conversation and motivated a gardening project. The children planted seeds and returned the following day full of anticipation. Figure 3.6 shows a drawing about the gardening project. The following annotation was scribed for the child by her teacher: A seed fell down, so the rain started raining and that’s me with the umbrella because I don’t want to get wet. So the sun came out after it has rained. The little seed that fell on the ground started growing. The clock shows the time the flowers take to grow. They do not grow in the same day.

A year later, when I returned to do some Saturday morning art activities, we re-visited some of the documentations of our earlier work via PowerPoint on my laptop. We ate rusks at teatime, and the sunflower seeds in the rusks prompted one child to excitedly propose a follow-up seed collecting foray. None of us could have anticipated this durational engagement with seeds. It depended on an intra-active series of encounters and emergences and an attentive noticing and following of concepts that emerged and re-emerged among the intra-active encounters of everyday events. Attention to the inside/outside of bodily experience in and with the world is a powerful motivator for exploration and enquiry. It is what Malaguzzi calls ‘aesthetic vibration’ (Vecchi 2010, p. 6).

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Fig. 3.4 Collecting winged seeds

Fig. 3.5 Choreography of mulberry mo(ve)ments

Rather like a large evolving art installation, the physical reality of early years learning spaces can instantiate and communicate the centrality of children’s complex ‘thinking work’ in the broader education project going on in the classroom. The use of an artist’s gaze is a profound shift away from the nineteenth century scientist’s

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Fig. 3.6 Seeds do not grow in the same day

gaze that Montessori employed even though there may appear to be parallels in the practices of observing, listening and recording of children’s responses and activities. The kind of listening required in an ethically aware pedagogy of encounter, such as that proposed by Vecchi, in her account of the role of the atelierista in Reggio Emilia, coheres with the notion of a sympoietic, posthumanist experimentation. An openness to the seduction of an ‘aesthetic vibration’ can connect us in an empathetic relationality with human and non-human others. The Grade R teacher had invited children to make drawings of two of their peers who had volunteered to be models. The two models were required to strike expressive poses that the other children were then invited to represent through drawing. We talked about the fact that children on opposite sides of the room would see different views. I walked around with my camera on the video setting, hoping to record the unfolding scene in the classroom, views of the developing drawings, as well as conversations going on. I came to a group of boys who were sitting together. I could see that their drawings included more than just a human body. Lawrence’s drawing

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Fig. 3.7 A view, through the security gate, of children posing to be drawn

had a grid drawn over it. In the general hubbub of the classroom it was difficult to hear his response to my request for an explanation. He had a quiet voice and an unfamiliar (to me) accent. He repeated his explanation several times and his brother also tried to get me to understand. Eventually he took up his felt pen and added small details to explicate through the act of drawing what he was trying to say. What he had drawn was the gate on the door that was behind him. He had drawn the model in the room as if he was looking in from outside the door (Fig. 3.7). The door of the crèche building has a security gate that remains locked, while the door is left open for light and air to enter. Lawrence had drawn the gate over the entire image creating a visual sense of depth as well as a socially relevant and contextualised viewpoint. In order to communicate visually with me, he added a lock onto the gate and a key into the hand of the person in the drawing. In re-visiting my documentation, I could appreciate my slowness to recognise a very visually competent message. My ‘teacher mode’ and expectation of ‘the same’ made me resistant (stupid) to recognising an innovative and different response to the drawing task. The practices of art-making, documentation and their use in collaborative teacher learning, as well as in planning responsive, relevant and appropriate curriculum allows for the (re)marking and re-turning of such encounters in which the new and unanticipated emergences are noticed. An encounter with difference in this case was made possible through the pedagogical practice of documentation. Moving beyond language and beyond disciplines, an arts-based pedagogy can invite open-ended and exploratory work with multiple modes and materials. Moving in and amongst different ideas, concepts and theories creates an ideal environment for

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an on-going research into ways of thinking, learning and making sense. The practice of documenting in detail the pedagogical events that occur have the potential to produce multi-modal ethnographies of learning. Montessori’s inspiration was science—the direct observation of ‘nature’ and its inherent laws. In periods of sensitivity, children would show an interest in a particular aspect of life, and this would be the cue for the teacher to introduce more of the same or similar concepts and content to make the most of and build on this interest (Montessori 1966, pp. 37–39). This can be seen as the beginnings of the emergent curriculum. Malaguzzi acknowledges Montessori’s work, suggesting that her writings should be ‘meditated on (in order) to move beyond them’ (Gandini 2012a). Malaguzzi has harnessed the potential of contemporary art practices to create a more open engagement with the world which is less prone to the ‘fact’-driven curricula that Montessori herself was so critical of (she believed that children should not learn about science, but experience the workings and principles of science and the natural world through direct experience). Malaguzzi extends her practice of note-making and observation but rather than focusing on the ‘development’ and learning of individual children, she promotes the collaborative thinking possible in groups. The two approaches share an awareness of the importance of non-interference at critical moments, but the Reggio Emilia theory–practice places the teacher at a closer position as co-thinker with the children. The teachers take the responsibility for provoking and extending thinking through questioning or designing follow-up investigations to take things further.

3.3 What Counts as Art? Creative expression and symbolic work abound in the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people, artists and non-artists are alike. Some of these forms fit the commonly held humanist definitions of ‘art’ and some do not (Gaztambide-Fernandez 2013, p. 215). Reuben Gaztambide-Fernandez believes that art advocacy (what ‘art’ teaches and why we need ‘it’ in schools) is not helpful as it buys in to stultified ideas about what counts as ‘art’ and excludes the more meaningful creative and inventive experiences available to people in and with their everyday lives and local cultures. It also plays into a stubborn binary that at its most extreme is a toss-up between the preparation for a career in the arts or a way to enhance mathematical skills. Art is not a tool with which to improve learning, but according to Gaztambide-Fernandez, it is learning. Once we get beyond these limiting definitions and instrumentalist ‘improvement’ programmes we can look at how creative encounters work intra-actively and beyond and without the art label. We can conclude that things are doing things to other things: that between the material of the cultural product and the participant, there is a mutual resonance or an ‘affect’ that changes things. David Andrew, Johannesburg-based art education theorist and colleague, claims that the semiotically bounded multiliteracies discourse in education could be deepened by the addition of an element he calls the ‘artist’s sensibility’ (Andrew 2011) and I sense that this has resonance

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with the Spinozist/Deleuzian notion of meaning in material that produces aestheticoethical affects in encounter, affecting and being affected (Deleuze 1988, p. 49). Tim Ingold1 writes about the practice of the anthropologist (the participant observer) as being this kind of learning through encounter: ‘knowing from the inside’ (Ingold 2013, p. 5). So, central to the work of the re-figured artist-teacher is this thing called art which defies definition but which may be used strategically and in combination with other ‘non-art’ practices to heighten experience and to decode and recode commonly held ideas through direct and intense intra-action with materials and spaces.2 This is learning-as-intensity.

3.4 Finding Materials Similar to the ‘what counts as art’ question is the ‘what counts as art materials’ question, and the provision of adequate art materials and equipment is an obvious next challenge for policy and implementation. Ideas about what constitutes a ‘rich’ environment are challenged by innovations seen in otherwise ‘poor’ schools (Taylor 2006; Kamper 2008) in environments commonly designated as ‘under-resourced’ (Andrew and Neustetter 2008). Limited funding in preschools (and an ethical response to waste, found materials and the environment) has the potential to stimulate creative use of found and waste materials for creating stimulating learning environments. The Reggio Emilia schools in Italy have developed a re-cycling system (REMIDA) that makes industrial off-cuts and other waste available to preschool teachers at centralised depots run by volunteers. Odegard (2012) theorises the use of ‘junk materials’ using the Foucauldian notion of heterotopia and the Deleuzian concept of lines of flight or drift. Her research with young children and junk materials suggests that this kind of material offers open, uncategorised possibilities for inventive encounters and engagements with and among children and seem to be able to short-circuit adult pedagogical expectations, prescriptions and their need to understand. The use of waste and found materials as learning resources alongside the digital documentation processes available to children in the Reggio centres and schools mirrors the visual culture contexts that pervade urban life in the twenty-first century. The approach therefore offers at an early childhood education level, the possibility for an exploration of ways of working within visual culture practices as opposed to modernist models of ‘art education’ that 1 Described

in his resumé for the French journal, Perspective, as working “at the intersection of anthropology and phenomenology”, Ingold explores the worlds of craft, art and making to find the flows of life, energy and meaning across, between and among material manifestations of reality. 2 For example: food and related concepts can be explored through the deterritorialising/decoding/moving away from concerns about ‘goodness’, nutrition’, and functionality through lines of flight enacted by responses to colour and aroma, or sounds of eating. These may be reterritorialised /coded into striations of colour combinations, shapes of vegetables or pasta, attractive place-settings, or rhythms. These ‘codings’ use an ‘art’ language to engage in material-discursive ways with everyday practice.

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Fig. 3.8 Alina’s graduation display including orange bag dolls, children’s drawings, activity cards, caterpillars and beads for threading

ignore contemporary and local cultural forms and discourses. Locally, art-in-ECD programmes like the Curriculum Development Project CDP and Masenze Ikusasa introduce the generative possibilities of waste and found art materials in their work with preschool practitioners. The Grade R teacher, Alina, completed her in-service practitioner training with Masenze Ikusasa in 2015 and I was invited to her graduation and ‘exhibition’. She was adamant that she had learnt more in the unaccredited course offered by Masenze than in the whole level four accredited training she had done at considerable expense and said that it was true for many of her colleagues. They needed the official certificate and accreditation for level four, but to learn about how to work with children this ‘free’ donor-funded course was invaluable (Figs. 3.8, 3.9 and 3.10).

3.5 Politics and Desire The postmodern philosophical position expressed in the writings of Rinaldi and other current theorists associated with the municipal programme and the public private partnership of Reggio Children explicitly decentres the child. Scholars and pedagogues working with the ideas set in motion by Reggio Emilia have moved a far distance from the notion of child as the individual learner of cognitive science. Taking up

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Fig. 3.9 A picture book made by a Grade R child displayed by her teacher

Fig. 3.10 A mini-town made from boxes, toilet rolls and bottle tops by a graduating teacher

from where socio-constructivism leaves us (with a still hierarchical theory of knowledge that foregrounds the intentionality of thinker, mediator, facilitator, designer and writer), a re-framing of pedagogy as a posthumanist experimental encounter invites us to consider the learner (including ourselves) as part of any number of possible phenomena but always paying attention to the ways in which our entanglements bring responsibilities. In each diffractive and intra-active encounter all parts affect and are affected by one another. There is no world that precedes these encounters that

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is then brought into focus or revealed through representation. So, ‘the ethical subject is not the disembodied rational subject of traditional ethics but rather an embodied sensibility, which responds to its proximal relationship to the other through a mode of wonderment that is antecedent to consciousness’ (Barad 2007, p. 391). Deleuze, whose monist (that is, non-dualist) ontological worlding inspires so many contemporary posthumanist scholars, calls us to eschew the intention, thought, identity and interpretation of the human participant as the beginning of all attempts to philosophise. Perception is life. There is not first life and then the perception of it (Colebrook 2006, p. 5). But to philosophise is the capacity for life to create new concepts through encounters with what it is not; that is with difference. Semetsky (2009), also working in a Deleuzian paradigm, offers an image of thought that puts percept, concept and affect into an inseparable triad. She proposes that affect provides the in-between of percept and concept, or the intensity of sensation that produces thought. The posthumanist challenge to multi-modal and multi-literacies discourses is precisely this foregrounding of ‘sensibility’ (Andrew 2011), resonance, seduction and affect untethered from purely human experience. The semiotic underpinnings of the above discourses make human intention, design and expression their focus and purpose. ‘Meaning’ in a posthumanist ontology is found in relationality: ‘Meaning is not a property of individual words or groups of words but an ongoing performance of the world in its differential intelligibility’ (Barad 2003, p. 821). The physical and the conceptual, or the material and the discursive are bound up with one another and continually co-constituting one another. My use of ‘concept as pedagogy’ builds on the notion of concept as method and is an invitation to follow the concept or the idea, rather than ‘the child’ of a ‘child-centred’ pedagogy. The theory and practice of Philosophy with Children (or P4C) works with concepts in an exploratory way. Some of the concepts (all connecting rhizomatically to the concept of environment) that are taken up and followed in rhizomatic ways in the pedagogical stories recounted here include the concepts of fairies, mermaids and their power to make children into storytellers; the concepts of the commons, of violence and of taking care; and the concept of names and naming and how these connect with ideas of literacy but also with relationality (Fig. 3.11). Current political and environmental conditions require a new attentiveness to instances of injustice, lack of care or indifference. We also require new pedagogies. We need to decentre the human subject and pay attention to the agency of matter (living and non-living), space and time and its discursive power to intra-act, diffract with one another and continually create new worlds. The loss of our central and commanding position in the uni(pluri)verse does not absolve us of responsibility. A posthumanist ethico-onto-epistemology (an always already implicated knowing-inbeing) invites us to become more aware of our connections and our responsibilities. It makes us able to respond and therefore become ‘response-able’ (Haraway 1997; Barad 2007).

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Fig. 3.11 A discarded roll of fax paper suggested the possibility of a pair of wings. ‘All I need is a piece of string. You wait and see!’

3.6 Philosophy with Children, the Community of Enquiry and the Centrality of Concepts Our enlightenment legacy insists that mind and body, head and heart are separated. Having separated our thought from our feeling bodies, there is an obvious extension to separating ourselves as individual thinkers from our fellow co-thinking humans and from our ‘companion species’, surroundings and environment. This enlightenment and modernist tradition picks up and reinforces Platonic notions of knowing and being. In contrast, Kohan, in the company of a growing community of poststructuralist and posthumanist thinkers, challenge this position through materialdiscursive engagements with the world in its own becoming—of which we (in our bodyminds) are an integral part (Barad 2007; Braidotti 2014; Haraway 2016). For Kohan (Kohan 2015, p. 39), ‘To learn has to do with loving and dying’: meeting the other in oneself and self in the other and losing one’s sense of homogeneity. Loving is also an important motivator and a connector much in the same way that the concept of ‘desire’ works in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. It is an a-sexualised love and connects with Spinoza’s notion of affect (the capacity to affect and be

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affected). Vecchi sees beauty and aesthetics working in this way as a ‘connector’. Drawing on the thought of Malaguzzi and Bateson, she sees aesthetics as creating ‘new maps that can combine logical and emotional processes, and connect technique with expressiveness’ (Gandini 2012b, p. 310). I had come to the community of enquiry and Philosophy with Children via my search for art education pedagogies that could offer dialogical and interactive practices with less hierarchical power/knowledge relationships. What began as a humanist concern for democratic practice and empowering relationships has led to an awareness of the classroom as assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Hellman and Lind 2017) or entanglement (Barad 2007), or a ‘work of art’ (Andrew 2011; Springgay and Rotas 2015). The ‘flattened’ ontology of posthumanism puts discourse and material, mind and matter on a level and interdependent. Human and non-human co-create the becomings of new concepts whose meanings are contingent and tied to direct experience and affect (Murris 2017). Diffracting art and education through the philosophy with children lens creates a more ‘response-able’ pathway through the entanglements of preschool life and ‘living and dying well together’ on the planet (Haraway 2016, p. 29).

3.7 Troubling Democracy Current critiques of western democracy coming from Marxist, feminist, postcolonial and ecological scholars draw attention to the direct relationship between North American and other western democracies and the advance of global capitalism and the creation of an ecological disaster (Cock 2007; Burawoy 2013; Sundberg 2014; Collard, Dempsey and Sundberg 2015). The rational, evidence-based justifications for development programmes often mask the exploitative, extractive, hegemonic agendas of powerful nations. Experts from outside are trusted with decisions that affect lives and livelihoods in profound ways. Even when ‘participatory’ processes are planned into development projects, they mostly happen within very limited parameters of possibility (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001, p. 34). The kind of futures we face are less clear than we thought. The kind of systems that we can invent to better manage the earth and the sharing of its resources are also still to be and always contingent. Haraway asks us to think in ‘response-able ways’. We must think—not with the ‘human exceptionalism and utilitarian individualism of classical political economics’, but more like a compost pile of fermentation in which we find ways of ‘living and dying with response-ability in unexpected company’ (Haraway 2016, p. 38). Child, as one of the ‘others’ of the enlightenment humanist project, is included in this unexpected company. Haraway makes the important observation that neither Marx nor Darwin saw history proceeding in a consecutive and predictable way. Marx did place ‘Man’ in the centre of his theory, as ‘the motor of human history’ (Braidotti 2013, p. 23) but he did not propose a programme. The process of natural selection which is at the heart of Darwin’s theory follows no programme of ‘progress’ or ‘development’

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towards a higher state (Gould 2003; Haraway 2016). The element of chance and the complexities of entangled existence which may include conflict and confusion create unexpected events. Kohan and his colleagues introduce this sense of the unexpected and the open-ended into the practice of P4C. They keep re-turning to the practice of questioning and wondering. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, the second book making up ‘Capitalism and schizophrenia’, enter the complex machinery of capitalism and its genealogy to propose a nomadic philosophy to counter what they call ‘State philosophy’. The wild and unpredictable tendencies of late capitalism are part of the way our world is operating. How best to respond to this ever-extending machine? As Massumi (Massumi 2015, p. 20) discusses, in late capitalism, the state has relinquished institutional power (prisons are privatised and mental hospitals are replaced with community home-based care projects). Capitalism now uses the power of markets to produce variety. New niches for the generation of profit are invented, no matter how short-lived or bizarre. Considering the productive and creative workings of power, Braidotti compares dualist and monist ideas. The dualist view has a negative sense of power as control, and effecting inclusion or exclusion (as with schools, prisons or asylums). This is ‘Potestas’ which works through hierarchy and structure. Potentia, on the other hand, is a positive sense of power as possibility working across and through societies. As Foucault puts it: Power is distributed, it moves and flows and can be used productively (Braidotti 2013, pp. 26–27). When both Potestas and Potentia are used to think with, theory does not stop with a disabling critique. Thought takes on a fluid and open-ended movement. Deleuze and Guattari challenge ‘the traditional image of thought’ (Deleuze 1994, p. xvi) and propose a vegetal one: that of a rhizome that sprouts in all directions and pops up in unexpected places. The rhizome replaces the arborescent image of thought that we are familiar with: the single trunk of thought that branches in sequence creating finer and finer distinctions. Thesis and antithesis fits this tree image. Thought links directly with knowledge, so if we use this image, we can see that knowledge also breaks free from the predictable fixed categories of ‘normal’ science as we know it (Kuhn, cited in Urban 2014). In the descriptions of ‘normal’ science, thought and rationality operate as organisers of empirical practice and experience in the world. Olsson (2009) draws from both Deleuze’s (1994) Difference and repetition and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994) What is Philosophy, to bring an alternative notion of thought into pedagogical work in early childhood settings. Thought in this philosophical sense does not represent, discover or organise: it produces (Olsson 2009, p. 94). Malaguzzi’s image of the ‘tangle of spaghetti’ works in the same way: stick your fork in—when you encounter some other parts of the world knowledge presents itself in uniquely connected ways—there is no neat categorisation into subjects, fields, topics or disciplines. Our thought follows the pattern of our particular and contingent experience of knowledge. There is little use for a pre-existing hierarchy of ready-made knowledge. I have to follow my shoot, root or strand of spaghetti in order to know what I want to know or what there is to know. Following the instruction of a teacher is likely to lead me nowhere in terms of my own thinking. In Difference

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and repetition, Deleuze says that ‘our only teachers are those who tell us to “do with me”, and are able to emit signs to be developed in heterogeneity rather than propose gestures for us to reproduce’ (Deleuze 1994, p. 23). Rather than seeking to fix and finalise concepts and ideas about things in the world as finite identities with predictable characteristics and qualities, our quest in education is to come to an awareness of shifts and disruptions and changes in our experiences shared with human and non-human, living and non-living co-creators of meaning. My task in this writing is to tell stories about a learning environment and the human and more-than-human components that make up that particular becoming of the world. These components did not pre-exist as fixed entities with particular qualities or identities but were (are) produced through intra-acting in the ‘cuts’ I am part of. Change occurs when things are affected by something else. Spinoza considers this change in terms of bodies in the world—not bodies as in human bodies but in terms of parts of an integrated system that is the universe. He conflated this all-encompassing universe with his (controversial) idea of God. ‘Affectus’ is the word used by Spinoza and by Deleuze in his writings on Spinoza, for ‘the passage from one state to another’ and ‘an increase or decrease in the power of acting’ (Deleuze 1988, p. 49). Thus, affect is not equal to emotion, although emotion is a strong indicator of affect in human bodies and can trigger an increase in the affecting of other bodies. Affect is materially physical and connected with sensation and intensity of experience. Elizabeth Grosz, in her small powerful book called ‘Chaos, Territory, Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth’, notes that ‘sensations, affects and intensities…link the lived or phenomenological body with cosmological forces, forces of the outside, that the body itself can never experience directly. Affects and intensities attest to the body’s immersion in nature, chaos, materiality’ (Grosz 2009, p. 3). For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts – including the town – are nonhuman landscapes of nature’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 169). Human and non-human are entangled in phenomena in which boundaries are fluid and shifting. Where does the string end and the vibration start?

3.8 Forces of Meaning and Matter(ing) The idea of chaos versus the order of thought is useful when considering the processes we call learning, and the creation of the new. Grosz explores how art, philosophy and science draw from the ‘provocation posed by the forces of the earth’ to produce meanings of particular kinds. Science gets less attention as she considers it the ‘more serious sibling’, while art and philosophy are ‘twin rafts over chaos’ (Grosz 2009, p. 8). With the help of Deleuze and Spinoza she makes a case for art and philosophy as sharing a similar relation to both the earth and to the ‘living body’ and in the ‘ways they divide and organise chaos to create a plane of coherence, a field of consistency, a plane of composition on which to think and to create’ (Grosz 2009, pp. 4–5). An openness to emergence is an openness to chaos as it is through a willingness to be

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and stay in moments and places of confusion, disruption, uncertainty and even fear, which allows us to be affected by the world and to change with it. The forces of the earth express themselves through the earth’s materiality (including our own). These are the forces that make up the ‘thing-power’ that Bennett writes ‘to give voice to’ (Bennett 2010, p. 2). How do the ‘laws’ of science and nature fit into this view of the world and its forces? Just as Kuhn noted in his 1970 work on paradigms, they are impermanent, situated and contested. Fröbel’s and Montessori’s efforts at giving children a mediated access to the underlying laws and patterns of life and material need to be acknowledged as relevant to the science and thought of their times. Children also deserve an experience of the wildness and wonder of our wacky uni(pluri)verse. If we appreciate the universe’s ‘queer performativity’ (Barad 2011), I believe we will acknowledge the importance of including the emergent and unexpected into our learning spaces. In his poem, A hundred languages, Malaguzzi offers a critique of formal schooling as presenting ‘the world as already there’ (Malaguzzi, no date). His introduction of atelieristas into the early childhood system in 1970 was his inspired way of inviting more of the unformed, unpredictable and creative to play a part in the lives of both adults and children. When early childhood practitioners work in this way, they are most likely to find that the challenge is for them to increase their own awareness, sensitivity and openness to invitations from the material environments they find themselves in. These environments include both inside and outside spaces, the preschool, as well as the surrounding public spaces that children navigate daily. Grosz (2009) wants to propose a more equal relationship between art and philosophy in which philosophy’s role is not one of judgement over the arts as in aesthetics. The arts as practiced in educational settings can break free of the confines of particular aesthetic standards and established notions of beauty. Not just any artist can work in this risky environment and Irwin’s conception of a/r/tography, discussed in the previous chapter, helps to re-configure the role. Malaguzzi’s ‘radical and courageous choice’ was to include people with artistic backgrounds without assigning them a specific role limited to the ‘languages of art’ (Vecchi 2010, p. 36). Vecchi warns that while two options are possible: to ‘specialise certain teachers in this area’ or to ‘request that artists contribute or come in and teach’, both have possible limitations (Vecchi 2010, pp. 35–37) due to insufficient understanding of the processes of ‘a pedagogical philosophy intent on embracing poetic languages for their fundamental role in learning and knowledge’ (p. 37). The arts in these contexts can work alongside the explorative thinking and meaning making happening in the direct relationships and intra-actions between materials, spaces, children and ‘their’ adults. In the conversations and negotiations around the makings and doings in the preschool environment, philosophy and art are well-matched companions. In discussing the ordering of experience on the plane of immanence, Deleuze and Guattari draw on the musical theories of Pierre Boulez in which he refers to contrasting smooth and striated spaces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 371). Deleuze and Guattari apply their ideas to thought more generally and show that thought, like music, has the capacity for the strictest form of order and counting, as well as the

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most open improvised unpredictable non-counting. Space can either be striated— counted and following set patterns and tracks—or fluid, smooth and unexpected. The smooth and the striated exist in variable permutations. Lenz Taguchi (2010) diffracts her pedagogical research in Swedish preschool sites through these notions of difference. She notes that the striated forms of preschool routines offer stability and a sense of security to many children while the freedom and openness invited in by the practitioners or claimed by particular children cuts across this order to allow ‘lines of flight’ that disrupt and renew the lay of the land. Similarly, she uses the ideas about the speeding up and slowing down of intensities that Deleuze brings from Spinoza, to draw attention to the subtle changes that take place in the affective experiences of different children as they encounter new knowledge (surprise, wonder, realisation, amazement) and then re-visit, repeat, re-consider and re-work these ideas. The theory-practices of both Philosophy with hildren and the progetazzione of the Reggio Emilia enact a nomadic process of pedagogy in which art-making and philosophy work together with each other and with the materialities of learning spaces that are also always discursively negotiated. Emerging from a dialogical (and rationalist) form of enquiry, P4C has moved into multi-modal posthuman practices (Kennedy 2015; Kohan 2015; Murris 2016). Stanley’s ‘Philosophy by Children’ depends on the gathering of provocations from children’s play (Stanley and Lyle 2017). Practitioners take the idea of enquiry beyond a purely dialogical form. They include a range of activities to enhance the explorations and experimentations (drama activities, artmaking, games). Practitioners working with younger children who do not write yet, or who work in modes other than purely language, will adapt the process and find ways to work with concepts materially. The introduction of a provocation into a learning event is the point at which one puts the fork into the mess of spaghetti and performs an agential cut (Murris 2016, p. 178). The picture books that P4Cers select are generally those in which pictures deviate from the direct meaning correspondence of the words and that usually leave things unresolved. Books and other starting points are chosen for their possibilities for ambiguity, puzzlement and depth of response: their capacity to perplex. They are presented as an invitation or a welcoming. The impulse to ask questions that we don’t already know the answers to is possibly more common among children of four, and much less common among older children and their teachers who may have been schooled in a desire to accumulate already established facts. Questions that have kept people thinking for centuries are the ones that revolve around central, common, contestable topics like ‘love’, ‘death’, ‘existence’, ‘truth’, and ‘justice’ ‘Friendship’, ‘dreams’, ‘what animals know’, ‘how many toys are enough’? All these and similar perplexities are connected to deep philosophical issues and are likely to emerge among young children and their play. The community of philosophical enquiry provides a place in which to play with these concepts and to practice dialogue, disagreement, contestation, changing our minds, convincing each other, building on each other’s thinking, knowing and not knowing. An open attitude and anticipation of the ‘new’ is the transformative aspect of this pedagogy that continually changes practice. Here the parallels with Reggio Emilia’s documentation are apparent. They are both ‘listening’ pedagogies that seek

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to complexify and attend to the birth of new ideas, questions and concepts (Haynes and Murris 2012, p. 214). Meaning emerges from the muddle of experience, intuition, affect and memory where the unconscious and conscious meet. The Reggio projectbased approach has as an element of the process in their daily ‘assemblies’ in which the larger group congregates and assesses progress, developments, emergent ideas and possible trajectories before returning to their smaller group projects. Physical spaces, like stepped platforms and circular seating arrangements, have co-productive and intra-active agency in these assemblies.

3.9 Democratic Practice The principles and practice of democracy and equality are pragmatically enacted in the community of philosophical enquiry through agreeing on procedures and practices, choosing a question, taking turns etc. The South African school curriculum refers to similar values in their discussion about the ‘principles of the revised national curriculum statement’ in the Overview section of the National Curriculum Statement (Department of Education 2002, p. 10) and in the critical and developmental outcomes (Department of Education 2002, p. 11). In the community of enquiry learners live their values in the present community (as citizens)—they are not being prepared only for future citizenship (Lipman and Sharp 1978). Children and their teachers can be equally perplexed and unsettled by what emerges. As such P4C, while containing the word ‘children’, is age-independent, non-developmental or ‘post-age’ (Haynes and Murris 2017). The community of enquiry (CoE) offers a model for a classroom environment and practice for the sustenance of reasonableness (rationality with ethical judgement), but also for taking responsibility and being response-able. In this way, it can be seen to be creating the material conditions for ethical (care-full) and response-able learning experience. The daily routines of preschool life are the systems that can challenge our ethical choices about things like what we eat, how we speak and who decides. Agency and structure are in constant diffractive intra-action. Democracy is a complex concept that materialises differently and in particular intra-actions. Our constitutional democracy has introduced a universal franchise in which everyone (of a certain age) can vote at prescribed times. In a more grassroots or ‘direct’ version of the same concept, we would see decisions being made through debate and consensus at all levels of society—not just every five years to bring in the top layer of ‘representative’ leadership who effectively get to make all the decisions. Joint and collaborative decision-making takes practice and skill and requires the ability to both listen and to voice uncomfortable truths. Philosophy for Children is a commitment to this form of co-production of our world. In CoE practice, the motivation for participants to commit to the procedures and to the purpose of the enquiry is the sense of being respected as capable of contributing towards the co-construction of meaning. The role of the teacher not only as coenquirer but also as ‘guide’ and ‘guardian’ of the space of enquiry enables this

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commitment (Haynes and Murris 2009). When working with young children, the teacher’s beliefs about childhood and her disposition towards the children in her class in particular will influence the way in which she includes and consults each learner as a ‘co-enquirer’. As a guide, her role is to push for intellectual depth and rigour, as a guardian, to protect the safe space for taking risks with ideas and for disagreeing.3 In the preschool context, working as I was with young children with varying levels of oracy and a range of different language proficiencies other than English, my attitude towards the expression of power, equality and voice was crucial. A deficit view can be held about children with low levels of language proficiency. To what extent does this mean that they cannot be invited to think? This is similar to the provocative question that French philosopher, Jacques Rancière asked in his account of the unorthodox methods of Joseph Jacotot. He asks, ‘Who has the right to think?’. Jacotot, a nineteenth century teacher, proposed that the assumption underlying our approach to teaching should be equality, not inequality. Explication and instruction only function to entrench inequality. In the voice of a hypothetical teacher: ‘You will only understand once I have explained. You will become more and more intelligent depending on whether you pay attention to my explanations’. On the contrary, ‘Intelligence is: observing, comparing, and combining, of making and noticing how one has done it’ (Rancière 1991, p. 36) and therefore, a teacher (or parent) only needs to stimulate the will (or desire) of the learner to learn (or teach herself). Rancière confirms (differently) what Socrates shows that there is no direct cause and effect relationship between teaching and learning (Kohan 2015, p. 69). Similarly, we may ask: what do we do when we recognise the self-perpetuating mechanisations of an education that constructs its subjects as ‘ignorant, mystified or naïve’? (Ross 1991, p. 62). As a researcher in this wilding childing space, and under the mantle of the mutated modest witness, it is I who must rather take on the subjectivities of the ignorant, mystified and naïve learner. To conduct research ethically, I embark on co-producing knowledge with the children, their adults and their spaces of learning. I engage in listening, questioning, recording, returning and re-visiting enabled by the technologies of my role: my fieldnote book and my camera.

3.10 Technologies of Enquiry Sylvia Kind, atelierista and contributor to ‘Being with a/r/tography’ (Spinggay et al. 2008), discusses photography as method in early childhood education research. She writes: ‘The language and conventions of photography tend to emphasise images that are “captured” and a gaze that objectifies’, bringing with it ‘a history of voyeurism, 3 The

less instrumentalist approaches to P4C (Echeverria & Hannam, 2010) work with notions of democratic practice that have much in common with Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism: undecidability, conflict, unresolved dissensus.

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othering and violence’ (Kind 2013, p. 427). This colonial practice of collecting, categorising, typing and exoticising is always a possibility. However, the undertaking, in my ethics agreements with parents, children and teachers, was not to include clearly identifiable images of individual children. The selection of images and the generation of stills images from the video footage was guided by this commitment. It was a new criterion for choosing images. Interestingly, this practice has generated a collection of images that have relationality and intra-action as their subject. Seldom does an individual stand out as the ‘subject’ of the picture. Even in one image in Chap. 6 where a child is seen crouched over and writing on a piece of paper on the astro turf near the outdoor play equipment, the light effects have created a diffractive energy swirling around her. Ordinarily I may have by-passed this image due to it being ‘out of focus’. Instead, the blurr works as a connector and a reminder of the relationships and affects at work in the event. The concern for the adherence to the promise of anonymity unexpectedly gave me a new way of looking at images: a new aesthetic framework. Once I had presented a documentation to the parents and teachers in a Saturday meeting, I felt it was important for the children to have access to these particular images as well. I printed a selection of images in A4 format. The many photographs I printed and brought into the preschool classroom were claimed very quickly. They were immediately identified by individuals who recognised them, named themselves as legitimate owners of them and took them home. I re-printed a selection for display at the Grade R graduation, and these too, had been claimed by the end of the event. I see this an important emergence of authorship and experience of ‘intellectual property’ on the part of the children. Photographers are considered ‘owners’ of the pictures they take, but in a more in-between, relational sense, the subjects of their pictures can also claim ownership. In the case of the documentations, much of what was featured in the images were objects and artefacts constructed by the children and their thinking. Kind interests herself in ‘a seeing that recognises partial views and ambivalences’, ‘embodied and located understandings’, one that ‘gives attention to the temporal and transitive, troubles the binary of creation and consumption, self and other, and allows for a continuum of complexity and resistance’ (Kind 2013, p. 429). Drawing on the decolonising work of Rose (2004), and the feminist situated ontologies of Haraway (1988), Kind looks for a postcolonial photography that inhabits an in-between space, neither in or outside, but ‘with the world’ in a collaborative, mobile engagement that looks for disruptions and difference and goes beyond the notion of evidence and ‘indisputable recordings’ (Kind 2013, p. 429). This work and the writing of Elizabeth Grosz on the affordance of the ‘art’ image to capture and extend moments of intensity drew my attention to the way that particular images marked instances of change and disruption and continued to work in the world long after their making. In particular cases the significance of these images only emerged through later images that called back to them. In Chap. 5, for example, the cut-out images made by Thulani perform in this way. The first images of his fairy cut-outs speak across months and across the gulf between preschool and Grade one to his new population of cut-outs. A spatial and temporal diffraction is made visible through this narrative. As Ingold puts it:

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The work invites the viewer to join with the artist as a fellow traveller, to look with it as it unfolds in the world, rather than behind it to an originating intention of which it is a final product (Ingold 2011, p. 216).

The use of video in post-qualitative research is a growing practice (Pink 2007; Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli 2018; Murris and Menning 2019) and the workings of camera angles, lengths of shots and other filmic devices are drawn from film practices predating digital technologies. Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli report on an organisational study using video and ‘Barad’s notion of apparatus’ (Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli 2018, p. 24) in which the finding is that the apparatus of video produces space in particular ways rather than just recording it. The process is one that makes use of socio-material aspects of intra-action and the diffractive practice of reading insights, experiences or texts through one another while paying attention to emerging ‘patterns of difference’. Diffracting a Lefebvrian view of space, cinematographic discourse and Barad’s agential realism, the researchers examine the products of four different camera lens angles: a panoramic view; an American-Objective view; a roving pointof-view and an infra-subjective view. To summarise rather simply: the results of their study into the spaces of medical practice showed that the different angles produced different kinds of spaces. The panoramic view produced spaces that worked like containers for movement and patterns of workflow (most like Lefebvre’s conceived geometric space with aspects of perceived space of power relations). The Americanobjective view produced intimate and dialogical spaces of interaction between actors and foregrounded experience and some affective responses (This relates most to Lefebvre’s lived space). The roving view produced intra-active spaces that constituted unexpected relational connections between human and non-human elements unanticipated by the researchers (a view of the intra-action of human and non-human aspects that pushes the boundaries of Lefebvre’s framework). The webcam mounted on one individual’s head (the infra-subjective view) produced confusing and disconnected images that had a machinic quality and provided limited use for the study. They recommend that spatial research could be better practiced by using a range of angles in combination to produce different kinds of spaces for. Mengis and colleagues work in the field of organisation studies and focus on the spatial aspects of the video productions. In addition to the way that the lens angles produce different kinds of space, I am also interested in the way that the video as apparatus produces time. My camera worked as an extension of my body and I became the cyborg of Haraway’s nature-culture consciousness (Haraway 1991). I mostly used a single lens reflex camera with a video facility and sometimes I used my cell phone. The camera may well have been a more visible intra-vention than the smaller cellphone would have been, but the children and teachers seemed equally comfortable with my moving in and out of their spaces with either of the devices. The children took turns trying out the devices. They were more successful with the cell phone as they weren’t practiced at holding the camera steady and holding down the button. They would have needed some more time with this but it seems likely that cell phone cameras with touch screens will be the technology they will make most use of in the future. When spending time with the class and the teacher I would often keep the video facility

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turned on but still try to engage with people and things as necessary, using the ‘roving view’ described by Mengis, Nicolini and Gorli (2018). Just as I am unconscious of what my feet are doing while I am watching children doing cartwheels in the park, so I became unaware of the camera continuing to record while I talked to a child. While my footprints have vanished from the surface of the grass, the camera has preserved its products in its memory for me to re-visit at a later time. Unlike my words, these re-playings carry a sensorial experience and allow me a second and multiple chances to re-visit and diffract and in the process create new data. The data do not ‘represent’ aspects of a world out there and separate, but rather, the data are new sedimentations in the world that I and the children are part of. Two children, Pogiso and Miriam are drawing with chalk on the paving outside the preschool building. I overhear their conversation and it is about monsters. They are creating an image of a monster together. The creature has a huge head with pointy teeth and frightening eyes (Fig. 3.12). I sit next to them as they draw and am invited into the game of imagining this awful beast. I take a photograph of the drawing and then turn on the video application. ‘Why is this beast so frightening?’ I ask. Pogiso reads my vulnerability and my privilege and substantiates a monster that is after my camera. This monster, he suggests, will take my camera and break it into a million pieces! Reality and fantasy are fused in this moment. The loss of my ipad is so fresh in my sensorial being. The feeling of loss combined with the knowledge of my visibility as a holder of resources: a car, a computer, a camera. I am prey. The experience of this intra-action between me, Pogiso, the camera and the drawing is a transformative experience. It brings with it

Fig. 3.12 Camera-eating monster

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a new insight into my sense of being part of the world and into the precariousness of my role as white, middle class, resourced participant observer. How to listen and attend to the new knowledges made through the engagement with the spaces, places, materials, human and non-human participants in the study— the in-between? How to ‘carry on’ (Ingold 2013, p. 6) as part of the world and do justice to the relationships between these children, their families, the community, the spaces and the learning? I felt myself gradually becoming part of the working of the shifting entanglements of Siyakhula and noticed small changes in the ways that different members responded and intra-acted with me. The intra-actions were affected by connections, my compatibilities and my differences. A noticing, listening and acknowledging of the implications and often invisible connections between parts of the world and uni(pluri)verse is an ethical responsibility towards our ever expanding family of ‘oddkin’ (Haraway 2016, p. 2) and lively ‘nonhuman nature’ (Bennett 2010, p. 113). The reader will see repeated waves of movement across the surface of the account, some larger, some smaller, some crossing over one another and setting new patterns in motion. I take up Karen Barad’s invitation to avoid negative, dismissive othering critique but rather to respond creatively and to ‘[read] diffractively for patterns of differences that make a difference’ (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, p. 49). The challenge is to look at how things have landed as they have, and how we can look at them differently to be able to carry on living-with response-ably.

References Andrew, D. (2011). The artist’s sensibility and multimodality—classrooms as works of art. University of the Witwatersrand. Andrew, D., & Neustetter, M. (2008). ‘The C30 Project.’ Visual communication, 7(4), 424–442. Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Barad, K. (2011). Nature ’ s Queer performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 25–53. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2014). Writing as a nomadic subject. Comparative Critical Studies, 11(2–3), 163–184. https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2014.0122. Burawoy, M. (2013). Marxism after Polanyi. In M. Williams & V. Satgar (Eds.), Marxisms in the 21st Century: Crisis, critique and struggle (pp. 34–52). Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Cock, J. (2007). The war against ourselves: Nature, Power and Justice. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Colebrook, C. (2006). Deleuze: A guide for the perplexed. London: A & C Black. Collard, R. C., Dempsey, J., & Sundberg, J. (2015). A Manifesto for abundant futures. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105(2), 322–330. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608. 2014.973007.

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Cornwall, A., & Gaventa, M. (2001) ‘Bridging the gap: Citizenship, participation and accountability. In M. Pimbert, & T. Wakeford (eds.) PLA Notes 40: Deliberative Democracy and Citizen Empowerment. International Institute for Environment and Development, pp. 32–25. Deleuze, G. (1988). Spinoza: Practical philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Transl. Br. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1994). What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press. Department of Education. (2002). Revised National Curriculum Statement Grades R-9 (Schools): Overview. Dolphijn, R., & van der Tuin, I. (2012). Interview with Karen Barad. Mew Materialism: I nterviews & Cartographies (pp. 48–70). Michigan: Open Humanities Press. Gandini, L. (2012a). History, ideas, and basic principles. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini, & G. Forman (Eds.), The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia experience in transformation (3rd ed., pp. 27–71). Oxford: Praeger and Reggio Children. Gandini, L. (2012b). The atelier: A conversation with Vea Vecchi. In C. Edwards, L. Gandini, & G. Forman (Eds.), The hundred languages of children: The Reggio Emilia experience in transformation (pp. 303–316). Oxford: Praeger and Reggio Children. Gaztambide-Fernandez. (2013). Why the arts don’t do anything: Toward a new vision for cultural production in education. Harvard Educational Review, 83(1), pp. 211–237. Gould, S. J. (2003). I have landed: Splashes and reflections in natural history. London: Random House. Grosz, E. (2009). Chaos, territory. Art. Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press. https://doi.org/10.37113/ideaj.vi0.192. Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The ccience question in Feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. Haraway, D. (1991). A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the late Twentieth Century. In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp. 149–181. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest− Witness@ Second− Millennium. FemaleMan− Meets− OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Psychology Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2009). Opening up space for Children’s thinking and dialogue. Farhang Journal of the Institute for Humanities, 69, 175–188. Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2012). Picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy. New York: Routledge. Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (2017). Intra-generational education: Imagining a post-age pedagogy. Educational Philosophy and Theory. Routledge, 49(10), 971–983. https://doi.org/10.1080/001 31857.2016.1255171. Hellman, A., & Lind, U. (2017). Picking up speed: Re-thinking visual art education as assemblages. Studies in Art Education. Routledge, 58(3), 206–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2017.133 1091. Ingold, T. (2011). Being alive: Essays on movement, knowledge and description. London: Routledge. Ingold, T. (2013). Making: Anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. London: Routledge. Kamper, G. (2008). A profile of effective leadership in some South African high-poverty schools. South African Journal of Education, 28(1), pp. 1–18. Kennedy, D. (2015). Practicing philosophy of childhood: Teaching in the (R)Evolutionary mode. Journal of Philosophy of Schools, 2(1), pp. 4–17. Kind, S. (2013). Lively entanglements: The doings, movements and enactments of photography. Global Studies of Childhood, 3(4), 427–441. https://doi.org/10.2304/gsch.2013.3.4.427. Kohan, W. (2015). Childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship, childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship. London: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315765778.

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Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge. Lipman, M., & Sharp, A. M. (1978). Growing up with philosophy. Edited by Temple University Press. Philadephia. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Mengis, J., Nicolini, D., & Gorli, M. (2018). The video production of space: How different recording practices matter. Organizational Research Methods, 21(2), 288–315. https://doi.org/10.1177/109 4428116669819. Montessori, M. (1966). The secret of childhood. New York: Ballantine. Murris, K. (2016). The Posthuman Child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718002. Murris, K. (2017). Reading two Rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another: A reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child’, pedagogy. Culture and Society. Routledge, 25(4), 531–550. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2017.1286681. Murris, K., & Menning, S. F. (2019). Videography and decolonising childhood. Video Journal of Education and Pedagogy, 4, 1–13. Odegard, N. (2012). When matter comes to matter–working pedagogically with junk materials. Education Inquiry, 3(3), 387–400. https://doi.org/10.3402/edui.v3i3.22042. Olsson, L. M. (2009). Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education, Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning: Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education. Abingdon: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9780203881231. Pink, S. (2007). Doing visual ethnography. London: Sage. Ranciere, J. (1991). The Ignorant schoolmaster. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Rose, D. B. (2004). The ecological humanities in action: An invitation. Australian Humanities Review, pp. 1–1. Ross, K. (1991) ‘Rancière and the Practice of Equality.’, Social Text, 29, pp. 57–71. Available at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/466299 Ranciere and the Practice of Equality. Semetsky, I. (2009). Deleuze as a philosopher of education: Affective knowledge/effective learning. European Legacy, 14(4), 443–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770902999534. Spinggay, S., et al. (Eds.). (2008). Being with A/r/tography. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Springgay, S., & Rotas, N. (2015). How do you make a classroom operate like a work of art? Deleuzeguattarian methodologies of research-creation. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. Routledge, 28(5), 552–572. https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2014. 933913. Stanley, S., & Lyle, S. (2017). Philosophical Play in the early Years Classroom. In M. R. Gregory, J. Haynes, & K. Murris (Eds.), Routledge International Handbook of Philosophy for Children (pp. 53–64). London: Routledge. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067. Taylor, N. (2006). School reform and skills development.. In Money and Morality: 2006 Transformation Audit. Cape Town: Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. Urban, M. (2014). Learning from the margins: Early childhood imaginaries, “Normal Science,” and the case for a radical reconceptualization of research and practice. In M. Bloch, B. B. Swadener, & G. S. Cannella (eds) Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Care and Education: Critical Questions, Diverse Imaginaries and Social Activism. New York: Peter Lang. Vecchi, V. (2010). Art and creativity in Reggio Emilia: Exploring the role and potential of Ateliers in early childhood education. London: Routledge.

Chapter 4

Diffractive Encounters with Names

“I love you, Auntie Theresa,”. “I love you, Pogiso,” I reply. “But Auntie Theresa, do you know my other names?”

Abstract The thinking that precedes, supports and accompanies reading and writing involves rich visual and affective intra-actions. The chapter is an engagement with an event that provided an opportunity for three preschool children to strengthen meaning making through intimate and recursive playful intra-activity. The text revisits an intraactive encounter between three children, names and drawings on paper. The names on the pages invite them to recognise letters, recall the names of their peers and create syllable rhythms. Apart from sounding out names, the trio of readers engage in complex enactments associated with literacy practices.

What is a name and how does it operate in the practice of loving? Is loving and being loved important in becoming learner? As philosopher of childhood Walter Kohan makes clear, learning is about both loving and dying, two of the deepest and most intense experiences we can have (Kohan 2014, p. 39). The dialogue above was an unexpected intra-action on a library visit with the Grade R class. The conversation got me thinking about how unaware I was about the working of names, but it also made me notice this particular child and our one-on-one connection. I thought about how knowing more about his names and what his names meant to him might add to my ability to make a connection with him and learn from him and his five-year-old view of the world. Considering the few real possessions that children are seen to have,1 I acknowledge the importance of this precious possession, this semiotic artefact. I am reminded of the ways in which this possession (a name) can be stolen, abused or denied in colonial practices of re-naming, mis-pronouncing and re-allocating. A name can be recognised as a word just like other words in a language, made up of letters and sounds. Like other words, names can have specific ‘linguistic’ meanings 1 Lipman

refers to it in the (1990) BBC series “The Transformers”. He says that children own so little, but at least they have their own thoughts. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_4

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and also collect discursive associations and heritages as they get used and re-used and passed on from generation to generation. A name can connect you to a larger clan and among some African language groups, the clan will be associated with a particular animal to whom members of that clan are related, through ancestral spirits, and therefore directly responsible for (Kgari-Masondo 2014). Fikile Nxumalo tells us that her clan names also connect her to particular places where ancestors are buried and through whom the on-going human-geographical relations are expressed (Nxumalo 2019). Nxumalo’s home is neighbouring Eswatini (Swaziland). For many South Africans, the uprootings that occurred through forced removals from the mid1950s to the 1980s have permanently severed this connection and many of these names have only spectral connections with lost lands. These workings of names suggest an entanglement of discourse and material, meaning and reality. Names actively perform in the world. They, in relation with other words, humans, energies and practices, enliven events, a name called at a crucial moment prevents a mishap or a disaster, a name voiced in a soothing tone can ease pain. I started to consider names as material-discursive agents in the world. A name becomes something meaningful only in relation and in particular arrangements of performativity. Names in their myriad ‘doings’ are central to the life of a preschooler. There are names on charts and names on bags and shoes. Names on fee payments and names in games and rounds. Names on drawings. A name is a threshold between our separateness as bodies in the world and an invitation to a more intimate connection. The first letter of their own name is often the first meaningful phonemic sign for young children. This chapter re-visits an intra-active encounter between three children, names and drawings on paper. The names on the pages invite them to recognise letters, recall the names of their peers and create syllable rhythms. Apart from sounding out names, the trio of readers engage in complex enactments associated with literacy practices. The thinking that precedes, supports and accompanies reading and writing involves rich visual and affective intra-actions. I engage here with an event that provided an opportunity for diffractive encounters with their own and peers’ classwork and provided these three preschool children with a context for strengthening meaning making through intimate and recursive playful intra-activity. ‘Diffractive encounters’ is a term that comes from the Barad and offered in this account as a materialist response to more Cartesian notions of ‘metacognition’. Rather than a ‘stepping outside’ of thought and experience to ‘review’ it, the re-visiting or “returning” (Barad 2014, p. 180) of experience is considered as a diffraction through space, time and matter. In the way that waves move with tides or wind, then meet and overlap to create more and different wave patterns, so thoughts well up in response to reality and then re-turn differently to produce new thoughts. Modernist constructions of knowing have rendered time invisible (Lefebvre 1984, pp. 95–96). In her quest to take note of how time matters in the worlding of the world, Barad introduces the notion of “timespacemattering” (Barad 2010, p. 264). I suggest that the notion of metacognition can be framed as a diffracting of experience through the gratings of one’s composite experience (a flow of time) and knowledge of world and self. Rather than stepping outside of one’s thought in order to examine it, this

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diffractive notion of metacognition places the thinker inside the experiencing of thought. It is both a material and a discursive process. This is the doubling quality of affect: ‘The experience of a change, an affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience’ (Massumi 2015, p. 4). Deleuze says that ‘wonder, love, hatred, suffering’ are all possible ‘affective tones’ through which the world grasps us through an encounter and forces us to think (Deleuze 1994, p. 139). So, we have direct experience of the world, which sets up resonances of thought and feeling in ourselves and human and non-human others. The diffraction of these waves of affect create new patterns of being for all the intra-acting agencies. Being a part of the world’s worlding is the nature of our existence (Barad 2007a) but being aware of the experience is a diffractive, affective, learning consciousness and an ethical responsibility and response-ability. It is not helpful to claim this kind of knowing exclusively for humans. How do animals think? How does a dog know her name? A posthumanist (and decolonising) position leaves unanswered questions and sits with mysteries such as these, remains and dwells with inequalities and injustices rather than seeking solutions and answers that leave existing power relations intact (Canella and Viruru 2004; Tuck and Yang 2012; Haraway 2016).

4.1 Notes on Posthuman Notions of Knowing The Cartesian subject is positioned opposite the object of his/her gaze. In this model, the optical metaphor for knowing is dominant and the eye links directly to the brain/mind in which all thinking happens. The body is disregarded in the thinking process and represents a base and conscious-less ‘nature’ from which rational thinking separates us as ‘subject’. For cognitivists, better thinking requires a distancing from the object of our knowledge. This empirical and separate knowing is at the centre of the modernist project and is built on the principle of permanent critique, which Foucault considered one of the key defining qualities of enlightenment thinking (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, p. 53). Modernist democracy assumes the presence of a centred and separate individual capable of weighing up choices for the ‘common good’, and individually responsible for critical and reasonable decisions. It is important to notice that this ‘reason’ existed alongside practices like slavery and the oppression of women, defining universal ‘man’ as a certain kind of ‘white man’ (Canella and Viruru 2004) and was central to the exclusive constructions of ‘human’ essential to the colonial project. When enlightenment critique is taken to its logical next level, the critique of the modernist project is possible. Marx’s important work in conceptualising a world in which ‘men’ are equal transformed modern thinking just as Darwin’s natural selection gave humans an unpredictable and precarious future, equally vulnerable to biological and ecological changes. The science of the enlightenment, however, served the destructive and chauvinistic impulse of capitalism to the detriment of the planet all in the name of ‘progress’, selectively distorting much of Darwin’s science (Burman 2008, p. 16). Similarly, the partiality and shortsightedness of the colonial project is made manifest by the material reality of our

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current condition. Partial in that ‘development’ has served only certain sections of the world’s population, resulting not only in material inequalities but in the extinction of entire lifeworlds and livelihoods and short-sighted in their own terms in that even the wealthy minority worlds’ existence is threatened by extreme weather, food insecurity and global warming. The posthumanist paradigm is a decolonising one that puts us back into the world we are coming to know—in ethically conscious relationships. The poststructuralist shift in thinking in the mid-twentieth century places importance on ‘deconstruction’ as opposed to ‘construction’ in knowledge production.2 Foucault’s notion of ‘discourse’ introduced a more performative notion of knowledge which has contributed to new materialist formulations. Feminist philosophers have extended the work of Foucault to claim embodied forms of knowledge and have opened the way for monist (as opposed to mind-body dualist) ontologies like the agential realism of Barad. Barad’s material-discursive conception of knowledge acknowledges the co-constitution of material and our knowledge of it (our discourses or explanations). Her monist philosophical position has affinity with that of Deleuze and Guattari. Brian Massumi, translator of Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia and a Spinozist scholar in his own right, writes: …our experiences aren’t objects. They’re us, they’re what we’re made of. We are our situations, we are our moving through them. We are our participation – not some abstract entity that is somehow outside looking in at it all (Massumi 2015, p. 14).

We are diffracted through and by the encounters and mutually influencing agencies we are part of. In Chapters Two and Three, I discussed at some length the non-dualism of Baruch Spinoza. Spinoza was a seventeenth century Dutch philosopher of Portuguese Sephardic heritage who made a living grinding lenses for microscopes and telescopes. His controversial writings got him expelled from his Jewish community and his books were banned by the Catholic church. His interest in the behaviour of light is an uncanny connection with the work of Karin Barad. The Q of quantum and queer (the same Q but different) challenge the notion of identity and individuality. It seems that light is neither a particle nor a wave, but both a particle and a wave; in other words, it can behave as either depending on the apparatus being used to measure or observe it. Barad describes the famous two-slit experiments in detail in her book, Meeting the universe halfway, and the argument is far more complex than what I am suggesting. When observing the wave behaviour of light unexpected things emerge. Waves defy categorisation as objects and are described by Barad as disturbances. Waves are phenomena that can be seen all over the place (in ponds, bathtubs, oceans) and Barad uses these kinds of waves to explain the behaviour of light waves. Her interest in waves is as a quantum physicist and 2 Piaget’s

early conceptions of structures, equilibrium and disequilibrium are Cartesian in form and suggest processes happening in the brain alone. He proposed the basics of the ‘constructivist’ paradigm that sees the learner as the active constructor of his or her own knowledge, placing all agency in the human actor. The constructionist notion of learning (attributed to thinkers like Vygotsky and Dewey) acknowledges the reciprocal relation between learner and reality—we both construct and are constructed by our realities (Davies p. 121).

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as a feminist philosopher. She learns from waves about how to notice the on-going differences that differences make. When a wave meets an obstacle, like rocks on a seashore, for example, the patterns formed by the wave change. And when those patterns overlap or meet, further differences are created. Barad sees diffraction as both the connectedness and differentiation that constitutes the emergence of reality. Deleuze’s notion of ‘affective knowledge’ (Semetsky 2009) and Barad’s diffraction as methodology are visible in the encounter between three children and pages of class work. The first incident I present here in the form of an audio transcript with some accompanying still images is an incidental intra-active engagement between three Grade R children and a pile of their peers’ drawings on the subjects of ‘Spring’ and ‘People who help us’. The class focused on the theme of Spring for some time and went outside to see the spring shoots and new leaves, made their own leaf print and made drawings about spring clothes and spring food. I was present for some of the Spring activities which led to an extended exploration of seeds and planting. The theme of ‘People who help us’ is a theme that gets children to consider people in public services, like nurses, doctors, police officers and fire fighters. The work from these theme-based activities is often displayed immediately after production and then filed. The work is often hung very high on the display wall in the common area of the centre and it seems that it is mainly for the benefit of parents. The practice of looking at the work of one’s peers is not considered a necessary part of learning in this preschool and it is not mentioned in the Grade R curriculum. Looking at one’s peers’ work while in production is sometimes discouraged as there is concern about ‘copying’ and also peer products may be seen as ‘not ideal’ (or ‘wrong’) responses to the task and therefore better not dwelt upon. Models done by the teacher are more often the focus of instruction before the children attempt an activity, and the stultifying power of these models is often underestimated. What follows is the conversation (transcribed from a video clip) between the children as Koketso pages through the work of her peers and Bokamuso and Thulani look on, participate and contribute to her commentary. The photographs in this series are stills selected from the video clip of the event. I offer a narrative of the event (Figs. 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 and 4.8).

4.2 Transcript Story Koketso, Bokamuso and Thulani are sorting through a pile of papers belonging to their Grade R class (Fig. 4.1). It is after lunch and the tables have been piled up and it will soon be time for the children to have their afternoon sleep. There is a gap in the routine that allows for this intra-action. Koketso takes the lead and pages through the pile of papers, reading the name on the sheet and reading/describing/naming what is drawn or written there. ‘Apples, ice-cream, ice, cookies, and…(reading a heart shape) I love you’. She reads a name, ‘Michelle’, then repeats it, adding a suffix of endearment: ‘Michellie! (Fig. 4.2).

72 Fig. 4.1 Three children sort through a pile of their peers’ work

Fig. 4.2 Koketso is in control of the game

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4.2 Transcript Story

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Fig. 4.3 Thulani dips in and out of the sorting game

Bokamuso wants to play a game and asks her to close her eyes. She is not interested in that game and refuses. Bokamuso keeps on insisting that she closes her eyes. As a last effort, he tries to insist, ‘I won’t disturb you!’. Koketso continues with her reading sorting activity. The two boys have to fit into her programme (Fig. 4.3). Thulani continues with his job of wiping the tables but joins in the reading now and then. He puts the cloth on his head to create long hair. He is enjoying this ‘dressup’ game. He decides to show me his drawing of spring clothes. He pages through the pile of papers that Koketso is holding. Koketso allows this. They page through together. Eventually they find the one they are looking for (Fig. 4.4). He takes the page out of the pile, leaving Koketso and Bokamuso to continue paging. He points to each item and names them for me; ‘This is a skirt, this is a dress, this is also a dress… this is a quaiquai’—a colloquial onomatopoeic name for high heels that he acts out for me by walking on his toes (Fig. 4.5). Sorting names. Koketso finds his drawing of ‘People who help us’ and we then look at that one together. The fire fighters look like blonde Barbie dolls, but there is the requisite hose pipe in one of the figure’s hands (Fig. 4.6).

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Fig. 4.4 This is Thulani’s page

There is also, in the centre of the page, a drawing of a candle and a box of matches. Thulani explains that this is about ‘playing with fire’ (Fig. 4.7). Koketso finds Bokamuso’s drawing of People who help us. Bokamuso dismisses his drawing as ‘ugly’. Koketso reads out names as she comes across new names. ‘Nandi!’ she reads. ‘Where, where is Nandi?’ asks Bokamuso. But it is not Nandi. I correct the reading: ‘That’s Nokupiwa’, I say. Bokamuso repeats the name, turning it into a rhythmic chant, with long, short, short, long syllables: ‘No-ku-pi-wa, Noku-pi-wa’. Koketso is now hunting for her own page. Thulani takes over reading the names: ‘This one’s for Mavis’. Bokamuso makes a rhyme: ‘Mavy, Mavy, Mavis!’ ‘Where’s my own?’ asks Koketso. Thulani reads: ‘This one’s for Thandi!’. Bokamuso reads: ‘People who help us’, his ‘p’ in ‘help’ exploding in his mouth. Koketso notes the angled arms in Thandi’s drawing: ‘Every day Thandi loves to make square hands!’. Bokamuso repeats in agreement: ‘Square hands’. They go on reading names together. ‘Ade’ comes up next. The following one also begins with A. ‘Aphiwe,’ they say. I point to the name and read: ‘Arthur’. They recognise the name but they also know that Arthur’s name is not used like this in the class. He is Emedi, or Meredi or Mercredi. They go through all these various possibilities. Bokamuso pronouncing a beautiful French, Mercredi, with guttural ‘r’s. As they go through the pages, I sound out names they don’t recognise. I follow their

4.2 Transcript Story Fig. 4.5 Spring clothes

Fig. 4.6 The fire fighter is holding a hose pipe

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Fig. 4.7 Matches and a candle are a warning about the dangers of playing with fire

lead and sound out the syllables. When Dorcas comes up again, Bokamuso builds on his previous chant: ‘Dorca, Dorca, Dorca, Dorcasss’. Thulani reads: ‘Dineo’, Koketso sounds out syllables, but then adds in an extra one: ‘Di-ne-e-o’. ‘Bokamuso!’, we all read together. Thulani immediately adds: ‘Goggamonster!’, referring to a version of Bokamuso’s name used by John (a boy in the class who has English as his mother tongue and according to the teacher, could not pronounce Bokamuso). It is interesting to note that the name has the same number of syllables and three of the four consonants are common (if you accept that the ‘gg’ and the ‘k’ are close enough). Now we see a name none of us recognise. It looks like Chetiwe. Koketso tries an isiZulu ‘c’ sound: ‘sts’… I then see that it is a K written hurriedly: ‘Khetiwe! It’s Khetiwe.’ The next one is an ‘N’. I sound out the ‘N’. Koketso guesses: ‘Naledi’. ‘Nhlanhla’ I say. ‘Oh!’ says Koketso, and they all repeat in unision: ‘Nhlanhla’. Then comes Princess. I sound out the ‘P’ and they all say ‘Princess’ in unison. Bokamuso repeats the name, doing something interesting with the last syllable. He flaps his tongue so the sound spills out, ‘Prin-ceess’.

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The next one is Koketso’s. ‘This one?’ I ask. Koketso reads her name; ‘Koketso! For me!’. She doesn’t stop, she carries on paging. Thulani’s is next. He has drawn a mermaid, one of his favourite things to draw. ‘A mermaid again,’ I say. ‘Are you a mermaid? ‘, I ask, referring to some past conversations. ‘Yes!’ he replies. ‘Yes, huh?’, I nudge him for some detail. ‘The mermaid is gone’ he says. Koketso has moved on and is reading the next name followed closely in unison by the other two. Thulani says: ‘Rapunzel’. He and Koketso laugh; Bokamuso is bemused, ‘Rapunzel?’ he asks.. ‘Yes, look at the long hair,’ I say, pointing to the drawing (Fig. 4.8). The next time Nhlanhla comes up, Bokamuso starts saying Naledi, but Koketso jumps in with the correct name ‘Nhlanhla,’ she reads. Fig. 4.8 A drawing of a person with very long hair

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4.3 Worlding Conscious According to Lyons, a scholar of reflective inquiry, the self-awareness of a learner is a pre-requisite for self-directed learning and ethical practice (Lyons 2010, p. 41). This could be the ‘proper thinking’ as described by the Greek philosopher, Plato. He distinguished between this and ‘mere opinion’ (Semetsky 2009, p. 453). Proper thinking was thinking that connected experience with the concepts of the ideal realm of pure forms. The theory and practice of reflective inquiry accords agency to the human knower and may be critiqued for using a reflection metaphor that suggests sameness (Barad 2007a) and regarding experience as an object (Massumi above). For Barad, concepts derive their meaning from particular instantiations and relational intra-actions and knowing depends on the diffractive transformations inherently active in the worlding of the world or versing of the multi-verse. More than merely experiencing thoughts and ideas, ‘better thinking’ could be said to involve diffracting embodied experience through a grate of conceptual thought, prior experience or memory. It involves thinking about one’s thinking not in isolation but in the company of the time–space happenings of our experience always generating difference rather than sameness. One could say that it is a process of diffracting action and thought through a second sieve of time, and of recursion. Diffractive moves made by the three children in the clip include: Judging one’s own product: ‘I need to finish colouring in!’. Here a child responds to work done previously, seen in relation to an idea of a differently completed one, one that is virtual and imagined. In another instance: ‘Mine is ugly…’ is a response that suggests a strongly affective relation to the work of others and a self-critical position. This reflexivity is prompted by the work itself which recalls the activity and holds within it the memory of the doing. Rather than taking a position of distance in order to gain clarity of thought, a closer and more entangled relation to the material reality of one’s experience generates new meaning.

4.4 Embodied and Entangled Thinking and knowing are embodied; they are not done ‘by’ us but are us. Just as our experiences are not ‘objects’, but ‘(t)hey’re us, they’re what were made of’ (Massumi 2015, p. 14). Our experiences are an expression of our being and becoming learner. Koketso establishes and holds her physical space. She is holding the pile of work and paging systematically through it. She resists the efforts of Bokamuso to engage in what sounds like a far less rational activity of closing her eyes and seeing whose work comes up—rather like ‘snap’? He seems to have picked up on Koketso’s excitement about encountering new pages. He is suggesting a way of heightening the shock value of the game. Koketso’s body is positioned as if against an invisible orientating window onto the object of learning. The pages are held straight and in direct relation to the ‘desk’ surface. Their flatness allows them (invites them) to be piled and paged. Thulani points with his finger, modelling figure/ground

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differentiation and practicing non-verbal literacy behaviours like isolating single pieces of information and sequencing them. Teacher/researcher repeats the pointing out. Thulani has a self-conscious manner of doing this, with an introductory teacher question: ‘Can you put the picture?’ in a sing-song voice, as if modelling ‘teacher talk’. I recognise the tone and the body language. The choice of words is confusing to me and I suspect he is struggling to remember the correct English terminology used by the teacher. It was more likely ‘can you see the picture?’, or ‘can you spot the picture?’. Assigning personal meaning to direct experience is a non-Cartesian practice that requires affective response and a closing of the space between ‘subject’ and ‘object’. Affect and one’s personal choices, preferences and reactions are what preselect ‘knowledge’. For Deleuze percept, concept and affect are a triad of philosophical thought in which affect ‘bridges the dualistic gap in which the Cartesian subject is situated’ (Semetsky 2009, p. 444). In my study children engaged in playful and personally significant activities centred on the work produced by themselves and their peers. An awareness of names, sounds and letters was integrated with an awareness of each individual child’s product, their interests, their style and way of working. As seen in the transcript: ‘Thato likes to make square hands’; Thulani has an interest in women’s fashion. In both of these examples, relationality is an important part of the game: loving and learning are affective entanglements. The still image (Fig. 4.9) which shows the Grade R class seated in a circle on the floor with their files is an excellent visual record of the more flexible spaces common in Grade R environments. This kind of arrangement differs from most South African Grade one classrooms and more formal education more generally (in some cases, Grade R classrooms are little different from Grade one classrooms). The affordances of this kind of flexible space are many. First, they are using the floor. The children

Fig. 4.9 Filing

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can sit and move in a range of ways, as compared with the more rigid desk and chair arrangement in formal schooling (Dixon 2010). What does this flexibility offer? A child can choose to face her neighbour and play a clapping game while she waits to receive her next pages. Children can position themselves by the door which allows for watching the world (one group in the picture is fascinated by something outside). A toddler who walks in from the baby bunnies’ class is at ‘the right height’ to engage directly with a Grade R child—and to explore his dreadlocks (see Fig. 4.9). We need to ask how much the desk and the chair limit the movement, flow and connection that floors, and this particular floor, offer(s). The circle arrangement also sets this particular setting apart from a more formal teaching setup. The children can all see one another and the teacher, unlike in a formal arrangement of rows of desks where the focus is on the teacher and no effort is made to enable children to see each other, or where children sit in small groups of inwardly facing desks. Ironically, circle time or ring time in the preschool is usually the most formal and teacher-directed part of the preschool day characterised by direct instruction but has the potential for intraactive co-constructive processes. It is in this spirit that the Reggio school day typically includes an ‘assembly’ which is used for re-visiting documentation or proposing new directions for enquiry. The room shown in the image (Fig. 4.9) is not the Grade R group’s usual classroom space: their everyday classroom is a small, cramped space filled with plastic tables and chairs. This is a ‘third’ space of commonality and is a piazza of sorts (common in the preschool architecture of Reggio Emilia). The room offers very different relational possibilities from what the classroom offers. In accordance with the official curriculum, the daily products of the children’s learning endeavours are collected and filed. They record the progress of drawn ‘body images’, the writing of names, their ability to colour in the lines and cut along the line. The teacher in this site anticipated visits from the provincial education department representatives and knew what to show and what to hide. She tells me: Grade R children ‘should not be writing and should not have exercise books’ (personal field notes). A delicate game was being played in which responses to parents’ and government officials’ conflicting expectations were carefully choreographed. In the space between the everyday emergent curriculum and the official published versions of it, valuable learning was occurring, but much of it was missed by the official recording processes. Examples of this learning include the following: The teacher and I performed as scribes to write down the stories children told about their drawings during our seed enquiry. In breaks and after formal school time, many children joined in paper aeroplane making which involved geometric folding. On one occasion I walked into the Grade R room to find one boy leading the entire class in a rhythmic performance of a popular rap song. He was playing the complex rhythm on the table with his friend’s lunchbox lid. What actually happens on the rough uneven ground of preschool practice? The teacher of this Grade R class had limited early childhood teacher education. She was in the process of doing her Level four accredited course which is set at the level equal to a matriculation or school leavers’ certificate. However, her relationship with the children and her open and welcoming personality led her to trust the children as unique and capable members of her community. She dealt with the overwhelming

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demands of filing each child’s work by marshalling their assistance with the task, thereby providing an opportunity for them to re-visit and re-consider the work they had already accomplished and engage in collaborative comparisons and sharing— effectively ‘flipping the classroom’. The circular and floor-level seating allowed for a comfortable and convivial mood, as well as a connectivity between the children in other parts of the preschool (see the small visitor in Fig. 4.9) and with the outside (the view of the outside and the nearby city park). This pedagogical encounter disrupted the boundaries between teacher/child, learning/playing, inside/outside. The documentations presented in this chapter are a small selection of performative encounters of being and becoming in place, time and mattering, be/coming together with human and non-human companions in intimate intra-activity. Ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, offers the idea of time as intensity, as opposed to chronologically occurring moments. It is a durational notion of ‘un-numbered movement’ (Kohan 2015, p. 57)(Kohan 2015, p.57). Time is a child playing and, in this playtime, time is lost as in periods of intense focus. Both Vivian Gussin Paley (2004) and Hillevi Lenz Taguchi (2010) talk of a process of slowing down in their pedagogical processes with children, and in the next chapter, I will show that art-making can be host to this slowing intensification of experience. The transcript is a performance of human and non-human elements in intraaction, creating anew the lived and experienced concept of ‘reading’. Children, hands, bodies, names, pages, drawings and ideas together enact a literate becoming in an in-between space and time outside of the planned programme. The image of the children doing their filing is a frozen moment of intensity made visible and available to be re-visited and re-considered.

4.5 Reconceptualising Metacognition Metacognition is a term that in itself suggests that it has its roots in cognitive science which follows a developmentalist and neurologically based approach to learning. Flavell, who introduced the term in 1976, referred to metacognition as ‘the individual’s own awareness and consideration of his or her cognitive processes and strategies’ (Flavell, cited in Fisher 1998, p. 1). Ideas about ‘cognition’ are essentially Cartesian and assume a knowing subject capable of separating from the object of his or her knowledge in order to gain an ‘objective’ and rationally scientific view that can be proven or described accurately and repeated for purposes of proof. Metacognition would then describe the self-reflexive process of examining one’s processes of rationality from the outside of them. Vygotsky’s earlier contribution to the metacognitive debate (though not yet named) was the notion of unconscious, social and externally learnt behaviour followed by internalised and more conscious behaviour. Donald Schön (1987) introduces the term ‘knowing in doing’, referring to mindful action as opposed to reflection after the event. His descriptions of potters and other practitioners in close relation to their materials prefigure the notion of the agency of material although he places agency solely in the realm of the human, as does the reflective inquiry of Lyons discussed earlier in this chapter. The idea of metacognition

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as ‘thinking about thinking’ is also recruited by Philosophy with Children proponents, Matthew Lipman, Robert Fisher, Joanna Haynes, Karin Murris and others. Metacognition has been a useful term as it suggests a turning point or disruption to ordinary thinking so often assumed to reside inside a human’s head and about the world. The critical and creative thinking valued by the P4C community involves a recursive and diffractive aspect in which concepts are followed, examined, interrogated through examples and exceptions. The term, metacognition, needs re-visiting and re-turning to include the affective and intra-active more-than-human aspects of thinking being becoming. These aspects include the agencies of space and time as well as matter. A non-subjective notion of knowing-with, and becoming-knower requires a sense of the intra-active agency of human and non-human, organic and inorganic entanglements of the world coming to know itself: its ‘worlding’ (Barad 2007b, p. 392).

4.6 A Posthumanist ZPD I want to claim that Lev Vygotsky’s work with social constructivism prefigures a posthumanist approach. Nadia and David Kennedy (2011, p. 271) discuss ‘his notion of learning as a process whereby what happens between us is internalised so that it happens within each one of us’. If we take seriously his important principle: that when one looks at social interactions like speech, one must pay attention to much more than the words or language, we need to go beyond the human agents. The language used is part of an integrated system of social relation, but the language is part of a bigger system. What would happen if we were to look beyond the relations between the humans having the conversation? What non-human elements play a role in the ‘game’? His theory of the zone of proximal development is still useful if it can include these agential entanglements of human and non-human: pages, pencils, floors, names, hands, voices. As Wertsch reminds us: ‘Vygotsky was primarily interested in the dynamic aspects of human activity rather than static representational systems’ (Wertsch 1979, p. 3 footnote). On the threshold of the humanist/posthumanist boundary, we can consider the shared intra-active zone of our capacity of change (development) with time–space matterings (not just human others).

4.7 Re-Use, Re-Cycle, Relate The spontaneous, incidental and intra-active engagements shown in the transcript and the image point to the importance of time–space matter affordances in preschool contexts and make clear the value of documentation for creating increased opportunities for children and adults to re-visit these generative encounters. How can this kind of engagement be supported? Adults can see their role as predominantly that of creating opportunities for child-led intra-active pedagogical encounters. Beyond

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being child/children-initiated there needs to be an on-going openness to the multispecies, multi-object time–space mattering realities at play. The battle is always against the ordering force of the official curriculum and the daily programme. Teachers can take the risk of relinquishing power over the administration of the products of learning, for example, files, portfolios, displays, documentations and support an on-going use of daily products of learning (children’s responses, drawings and artefacts) in follow-up activities and processes. Importantly, the ‘users’ may include other family members in collaboration and conversation, disrupting the binary of school/home. Through this we can reconceptualise the material products of learning. They will then not only be seen as evidence of individual learning, as in forms of assessment of past, completed activities, but also as artefacts currently and always still active in the learning processes. These artefacts can be re-visited, as documentation to use, and re-use, allowing these artefacts to affect us in an on-going way, documenting and having agency in our learning. There are both inward and outward movements between the micro and the macro of becoming reader, with names performing at a threshold between the sounds of belonging and recognition (our personal names) to the world of letters, words and meaning. Both Philosophy with Children and the Reggio theory-practice nexus challenge the Cartesian dualism of knowing and knower. Both acknowledge the entangled nature of knowing which connects affect and physical reality through the phenomenon of experience. Everything is connected in a material intra-active way. But the most commonly assumed connection needs to be unsettled and possibly disconnected. We need to emancipate learning from the notion of teaching. Currently the two concepts are shackled to one another by our curricular terminology. We can uncouple them by creating times (routines or programmes) and spaces (classrooms, inside and outside spaces, piazzas) that have affordances for small group collaborations and unmediated intra-actions with the chaos and surprise of direct experience but also with the potent but largely untapped richness of the fresh products of our own pedagogies. Thresholds operate in between. They are passages and processes that invite, beckon, open, close, squeeze, transform what passes through or what meets ‘other’ at this in-between place of becoming. Deleuze and Guattari propose that it is in the threshold spaces between ‘milieus’ that action happens, and newness is generated: as in the twilight between night and day, and in the changes from one state to another. Living things have interior (composition), exterior (material circumstances), intermediary (limits and boundaries between) and annexed milieus (energy sources and action/perceptions), all of which become coded through repetition, but are continually transcoding, setting up rhythms within chaos (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 313– 314). Barad and Bennett extend this capacity for action to bodies we consider nonliving, as in the ‘liveliness’ of mountain ranges (Barad 2014, p. 168) and the impact of omega-3 fatty acids on human moods (Bennett 2010, p. vii). In my example above, the action and rhythmic encounters between the insides, outsides, limits and energies of children, names, images, papers and sounds create new patterns of practice. Names in particular invite the children into relational language games and operate as thresholds to literacy becomings.

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References Barad, K. (2007a). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Barad, K. (2007b). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglemment of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, SpaceTime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London: Taylor & Francis. Canella, G. S., & Viruru, R. (2004). Childhood and postcolonization. London: Routledge Farmer. Dahlberg, G., & Moss, P. (2005). Ethics and politics in early childhood education. London: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition. London: Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987) A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Transl. Br. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dixon, K. (2010). Literacies, power, and the schooled body: Learning in time and space. London: Routledge. Fisher, R. (1998). Thinking about thinking: developing metacognition in children. Early Child Development and Care, 141(1), pp. 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/0300443981410101. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Kennedy, N. S.,& Kennedy, D. (2011). Community of philosophical inquiry as a discursive structure, and its role in school curriculum design. Journal of Philosophy of Education, pp. 265–283. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.2011.00793.x. Kgari-Masondo, M. (2014) Sotho-Tswana mythic animals: Stratagem for environmental conservation, (71), 114–135. Kohan, W. (2014). Philosophy and childhood: Critical perspectives and affirmative practices. New York: Springer. Kohan, W. (2015). Childhood, education and philosophy: new ideas for an old relationship, childhood, education and philosophy: New ideas for an old relationship. London: Routledge. https:// doi.org/10.4324/9781315765778. Lefebvre, H. (1984). The production of space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge. Lyons, N. (Ed.). (2010). Handbook of reflection and reflective inquiry: Mapping a way of knowing for professional reflective inquiry. Dordrecht: Springer. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. New York: Routledge. Paley, V. G. (2004). A Child’s work: The importance of fantasy play. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schön, D. (1987). Educating the reflexive practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Semetsky, I. (2009). Deleuze as a philosopher of education: Affective knowledge/effective learning. European Legacy, 14(4), 443–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770902999534. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 1(1), pp. 1–40. Available at: https://www.latrobe.edu.au/staff-profiles/data/ docs/fjcollins.pdf. Wertsch, J. V. (1979). From social interaction to higher psychological processes: A clarification of Vygotsky’s theory. Human Development, 22(1), pp. 1–22.

Chapter 5

Fantasy Beyond the Corner

It matters what worlds world worlds. It matters what stories tell stories. Haraway (2016, p. 35).

Abstract Early childhood educators and carers enjoy the privilege of witnessing the wonder and perplexity that early encounters with the physical world generate in and with children. Taking the notion of learning beyond the metaphor of language to one of desire, the author acknowledges the connectedness and affective entanglement of ourselves and our worlds that make living meaningful and our expressiveness an impulse of learning as desiring. Moving back and forth between reality and fantasy, logic and speculation is an important part of thinking. In this chapter, the practice of documentation and sensory ethnography show a way of being in and with the world in which diffraction is not a metaphor but a methodology.

In the preface to her book, Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things, Jane Bennett frames her philosophical project as the ‘worrying’ of the modernist separation of life from matter (Bennett 2010, p. vii). She acknowledges that this modernism that occludes any notion of vital materiality is not necessarily shared by children nor is it refuted by Western philosophical traditions. There is a strong thread of ‘vibrant materiality’ linking thinkers such as Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Deleuze and Bergson. These philosophers have been part of a less dominant stream of thought in the last two centuries but have much in common with the agential realism and ‘composting’ theories of contemporary feminist philosophers Barad (2007, 2011) and Haraway (2015), respectively, and the philosophical work of philosophers of education, Kennedy (1998, 1999, 2012), Kohan (2011, 2014) and Murris (2016). Vital materiality is present ‘in childhood experiences of a world populated by animate things rather than passive objects’ (Bennett 2010, p. vii). The way that certain objects attract our attention, make us think, increase in significance and stay with us and become part of us is an aspect of sensory experience and ‘bodymind’ (Murris 2016, p. 8) experience that is important to include in thinking about learning. My sense is that there is a threshold time–space between not-being and being literate in which © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_5

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matter matters inordinately. This threshold is a time–space we need to guard fiercely and be able to defend as formal instruction creeps into increasingly earlier phases of education. The direct engagement of children with environments, objects and materials provide the doorway and the entrance hall to the huge and many-roomed house of learning. This is a generous and generative learning about and with the world which, according to PRAESA founder, Carole Bloch, is the foundation of literacy learning. Sadly proponents of ‘autonomous’, skills-based, phonics approaches see this as quite different from the kind of learning required for knowing how to read and write (Bloch 2006, p. 7). Importantly, these material engagements are the connectors that provide the impetus and the motivation to read and write and the contexts that make the learning meaningful. Whole language contextualised models of literacy acknowledge this (Street 2014) but their purpose-driven language and literacy orientation still downplays the richness of real-world encounters and enacts a dualistic opposition between the real and the ideal (Olsson 2020). Murris makes the point that the ‘adult hegemonic scientific Cartesian worldpicture that favours language and literacy and a particular kind of rationality and subject/world relationship’ excludes the ‘oral, aural, visual’ domains of the child and the artist, where supposedly ‘no real knowledge is located’ (Murris 2016, p. 172). The structured and product-oriented training that goes into the teaching of reading and writing currently in South Africa leaves little room for these ‘other’ knowledges, ‘takes away the ninety-nine’ other languages (Malaguzzi, no date), and frames ‘child’ as ignorant. Taking the notion of learning beyond the metaphor of language (a hundred languages, multi-literacies) to one of desire, I acknowledge the connectedness and affective entanglement of ourselves and our worlds that make living meaningful and our expressiveness an impulse of learning as desiring. In this threshold, changes occur, and differently for each participant. ‘Literacy desiring’ is a term offered by Kuby and Rucker as a way of challenging the multi-literacies discourse that tends to focus more on the products of pedagogy than on its processes (Kuby and Rucker 2016, p. 5). Using the verb, rather than the noun, ‘desire’, they draw attention to the ‘intra-actions, movements, and surprises’ (Kuby and Rucker 2016) that are produced by students, materials, space and time in a Foundation Phase multi-literacies language learning environment. Early childhood educators and carers enjoy the privilege of witnessing on a daily basis the wonder and perplexity that early encounters with the physical world generate in and with children. When toddlers begin to verbalise their responses to physical experiences we get some sense of how powerfully vivid and affectively moving these early experiences are. Mbali, one of the characters in my data storying and creator of the ‘leaf lips’ that featured in Chapter Three, is the child of an acquaintance. She was swimming with me in a small pond in my garden when she was about two years old. When we climbed out she remarked: ‘The water has made me heavy!’. In an interesting way, she was inverting the logic of the water making her light (supporting her weight), by applying cause and effect. She had been in the water and now she had the sense of being heavy (a feeling she did not have before entering the water).

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Her knowledge of the world is distributed between her body and its weight, her inner sense of her body, the force of gravity and the density of water. In non-verbal ways, children also use objects to communicate ideas before they have verbal linguistic competence, or when they don’t share the same language with their companions. Hamid, a recent immigrant from Ethiopia, who spoke very little compared to most of the other children, drew me into a dialogical experience with him and some available objects. He invited me into a game of hairdressing by playing with a pair of scissors (the tiny blunt nosed scissors common in preschool classrooms), using body language and very purposeful eye contact. Together in this improvised intra-action we created a story about hairdressing and power relations effectively disrupting the child adult binary. I happened to be seated on a small chair which placed my head at ideal height. Hamid made snipping movements around my head with the scissors, much to the surprise and consternation of a passing parent—causing hilarity among the present company of children. Subsequently, it was enough for him to catch my eye and make snipping movements with his fingers to re-establish that mutually shared narrative and connection and re-activate my laughter.

5.1 Reality and Fantasy In the learning environments of Reggio Emilia transdisciplinary explorations are taken up responsively from serendipitous events and ‘happy accidents’ through the rigorous and sensitive documenting of daily occurrences. The rigour and sensitivity required for the generative creation of pedagogical documentations is important to note. Rinaldi stresses that these are not for display purposes or for merely recording (Rinaldi 2006, p. 77). The documentations need to have resonance with the processes in which the children are immersed so that they can be used in the recursive revisiting and worrying of the perplexities and provocations emerging from them (Rinaldi 2006, p. 78). Listening, noticing and dwelling in and with the questions, proposals, explorations of thoughts and ideas of children is a pedagogical commonality between Reggio and P4C and requires an openness to events and encounters, and an ability to plan in a way that opens up multiple paths of enquiry for participants. Vygotsky’s appreciation of the value of the weird and wacky ‘spontaneous concepts’ that children produce is enacted in this ‘emergent curriculum’. Moving back and forth between reality and fantasy, logic and speculation is an important part of thinking. Invention and play are not confined to the ‘fantasy corner’ but spread through intra-active encounters with space, time and material. Ironically, the experience of difficulty in not planning end results and the urge to pre-empt and control the pedagogical process may be some of the consequences of formal scholarship and outcome-oriented learning practices associated with the standardised educational paradigm. Vecchi notes that for her, the process of learning as an atelierista, was one of learning to ‘undo learning’ (Vecchi 2010, p. 108). This is not to suggest that less learning is favourable to more, but rather that a different kind of learning is required and that the criteria for selection of candidates for this kind of education would be more related to the capacity to

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‘affect and be affected’ and an openness to change and uncertainty, than more formal academic knowledge and skills usually assessed by the academy. The kinds of curricula offered to early years and Foundation Phase educators is a relevant issue here. Hands-on, experiential and enquiry-based learning needs to be at the core of teacher education offerings if the strangle hold of product-oriented, instructional modes of teaching are to be broken. The commitment on the part of the provincial Gauteng premier to adopt a Reggio-inspired approach in the preschools of his province in 2017 has the potential to improve awareness and a more in-depth knowledge among policy developers of the approach and the value and importance of the role of the atelierista in working alongside educators to develop a project-based curriculum and a relational enquiry-led pedagogy (Browne 2018). Vecchi describes how in the 1970s, Malaguzzi worked hard to make this role ‘precious and necessary’ (Vecchi 2010, p. 109) to counter cost-cutting moves by administrators. The Reggio Emilia project is unequivocally an endogenous and locally responsive endeavour, with a deep connection to specific political, historical and geographical realities that has captured the imagination of the international early childhood community. The urge to ‘grasp’ what is Reggio and duplicate it elsewhere is understandable but impossible and even undesirable (Rinaldi 2006; Barclay and Browne 2019). Resisting commercial franchise pressures, the organisation of Reggio Children shares their learning through international workshops, networks and publications, in the hope that rather than generating Reggio clones, other communities will ‘embark on local cultural projects of childhood’ (Dahlberg and Moss in Rinaldi 2006), towards the creation of better and more democratic societies. The pedagogical stories related here were generated in a community-based not-for-profit preschool in an inner-city area. It does not claim to be ‘Reggio-inspired’ but being a centre serving a community of diverse, working-class urban children who depend on local government services it was a good place to explore ways of working that are cognisant of the entanglements and diffractive waves and patterns of difference in a particular space and time but that would be likely to have resonance with and relevance to situations in multiple sites in the country. My ethnographer’s field note sketch book drew in a number of sketchers whose generous and enthusiastic response ‘outed’ my solitary and individualistic habits and undermined my ideas about ownership and control. So often my role as researcher was challenged by children who have a much better eye for opportunities for collaboration and co-production. Jason Junior added the image of a rocket on its way to the moon, drawn without hesitation or a single repeated or modified line (Fig. 5.1). Thulani made a contribution in the form of a mermaid line drawing (Fig. 5.2). The mermaid repertoire (Kindler 1999),1 which I later found out, functions as a connector in his friendship with Mbali. They both often draw mermaids, and their drawings

1 Kindler

(1999, 2004, 2010) has offered a range of alternatives to the Piagetian stage theories of Lowenfeld, Kellogg and others, linking art pedagogies with contemporary art practices. Her notion of repertoires is an alternative to the Piagetian ‘schema’ supporting a multi-modal approach to art practice going beyond the visual but centring human agency.

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Fig. 5.1 A rocket on its way to the moon is added to the research field notes

share a number of features. Interestingly, the mermaid or Mami Wata is a mythological creature that has strong presence in African mythology as well as European. I have not been able to trace the source of this fascination for Thulani and Mbali, but it goes along with other mythical creatures like fairies and princesses that are common currency among the children in the preschool and are strongly present and reinforced in Disney films, cartoons and storybooks that include traditional European fairytales. When the class was creating things with the winged seeds and other found materials, Thulani constructed a mermaid out of a bottlebrush flower, stalk and leaves (Fig. 5.3). Thulani and Mbali play on the large tractor tyres in the outdoor play area. The tyres become their horses. They mount and dismount like professionals (Fig. 5.4). They are Elsa and her sister, Anna, from the Disney movie, Frozen. Thulani hasn’t seen the film yet, but he is fully engaged, having been well inducted into the materialdiscursive realities of the subculture existing around the film. His hoodie (zip up hooded jacket) is his long hair that he can flick back with his hand. He wants the blue ‘horse’ to match his hair and calls me to intervene in an impasse, as Mbali also wants to ride the blue tyrehorse. I suggest that two people can ride one horse. Thulani likes the idea and they leap on together and supposedly ride off into the distance, each with their riding crops in hand. Later I see they have swopped horses.

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Fig. 5.2 A mermaid drawing made with fluency and ease fills the page of my notebook. I had made a photograph of the two images before I lost the notebook to wily thieves who removed my backpack from a locked car

5.2 Creating Provocations, Inviting Perplexity P4C and Reggio place importance on wonder and perplexity in learning (‘The wonder of learning’ is the title of the current international exhibition of Reggio Children). Malaguzzi differentiates between marvelling and wonder (Cagliari et al. 2016, p. 338). Marvelling is the day-to-day amazement at things that may or may not turn out to be worthy of deeper engagement. Wonder has a connection to eros, which can be interpreted as an equivalent of ‘life energy’ (Cagliari et al. 2016, p. 359). In Italian, the word for wonder is ‘stupore’, whose Latin root give us the English words, stupefy, and stupid. Tavin (cited in Hellman and Lind 2017, p. 211) proposes that stupidity has the potential to disrupt predictable ways of working in the arts. Care and precision in observation have been the lifeblood of the European visual arts tradition for centuries. Not looking where looking has been reified into a sacred unquestionable truth can disrupt conventional assumptions about knowing and reveal the sedimented assumptions that operate. Wonder is most often experienced outside of the predictable, the expected and the programmed. Wonder may be occasioned more by ‘stupid’ children and ‘incompetent’ teachers than by dutiful learners, expert

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Fig. 5.3 A mermaid constructed from bottle brush flower, leaves and a spherical seed

Fig. 5.4 Mbali and Thulani mount their horses. Thulani is happy that at last his horse matches his blue hair

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and effective teaching, instructing, facilitating. In a similar vein, Haynes and Kohan (2018) offer the word ‘difficultating’ in the place of facilitating. Thinking moves occasioned by encountering a provocation start from a surprise. Malaguzzi proposes that it is the form of reasoning Peirce called ‘abduction’ that comes into play. Abduction ‘contains no certainty but pursues the probable’ and ‘is part of children from the start’ (Malaguzzi, cited in Cagliari et al. 2016, p. 334). Abduction is listed along with a range of thinking moves by Peirce as part of the sometimes chaotic process of the community of philosophical enquiry (Kennedy 1999, p. 347). Linked directly to perception, abduction is ‘the only logical operation that introduces any new idea’ (Peirce, cited in Hoffmann 1999, p. 275). It is the generation of hypotheses in response to an unexpected or surprising event or fact, as opposed to the testing, or elaborating of already existing ones. The title of Hoffmann’s article is ‘Problems with Peirce’s concept of abduction’ and it seems the problem for science scholars is whether or not abduction a logical process. Peirce makes a ‘clear distinction between the logical or inferential form of abductive reasoning and—as a precondition of this reasoning—the genuine creative act of “perceiving” possible explanatory hypotheses’ (Hoffmann 1999, p. 278). Linking creativity, perception and logic, the in-between (spaces, connective tissue, medium, catalyst) of percept and concept is filled (Semetsky 2009). The shared monism (Spinozist) of Peirce and Deleuze is clear in this ‘image of thought’. And as discussed in Chapter Three, Karen Barad’s notion of an ethical posthuman subject is dependent on an ‘embodied sensibility’ and the trigger of ‘wonderment’ (Barad 2007, p. 391). The Philosophy for Children movement has faced the on-going critique from different quarters citing a number of ‘overlapping and conflicting’ reasons (Gregory et al. 2017, p. xxvii). Some of these critics, coming mainly from a psychological standpoint, question the capacities of young children to philosophise, think and enquire. Rather than leaving the argument at the point of proving children ‘capable’ of philosophising, Kennedy (1999) radically critiques the particular construction of human reasoning that underlies much of the discourse around children’s capabilities. In modernist, rationalist forms of European philosophy (based on PlatonicAristotelian traditions) and what Kennedy terms ‘the politics of rationality’, children fall outside of the realm of the rational (along with women and the enslaved). This singular rationality has been challenged since the exoticisms of the Romantics, and later, psychoanalysis, surrealism and outsider art at the turn of the last century offered ‘multiple images of reason’ (Kennedy 1999, p. 353). Kennedy’s thesis, drawing from feminist standpoint epistemology, is that children in their position as the ‘outsiders’ to the dominant epistemology actually have the potential to re-connect our thinking with more holistic thinking paradigms that do not separate subject from object, as in ‘mainstream Western epistemology’ (Kennedy 1999, p. 354)2 and that also incorporate the irrational, and the imaginary (not relegating them to the shadows of the unconscious). In this way, they have the capacity to offer something to the rebuilding 2 Children are often seen as having less knowledge due to their comparatively short life-experience,

but the other side of this fact is that they are less likely to have been inculcated into the Cartesian dualisms and ‘sedimented knowledges’ (Kennedy 1999, p. 354) that we as adults have taken on.

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of philosophy itself and can be valued as thinkers. An undoing of this narrow conception of reason has been part of the project of postmodernism, a project that Kennedy describes as an effort to find the ‘between’ of inside and outside, subject and object. Guattari’s work on the concept of ‘desiring’ can be seen to extend this project and to offer a way to consider the material-discursive energies of thought and affect working in, among and between bodies.

5.3 Becoming Child In more recent work, Kennedy (2013) has drawn on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-child, which works as a ‘process of desire’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 272). This notion of child is the molecular or minoritarian3 child, not fixed and identifiable, but decoding and recoding itself, ‘fluid, ambivalent or polyvalent, open to change, continually being made, unmade and remade’ always resisting ‘the molar system based on majoritarian (white, male, middle class) dualisms, hierarchy, psychological splittings and exclusions’ (Kennedy 2013, pp. 5–7). The becomingchild inhabits the intensity of aion, or aeon, an in-between space of intensity and eternity with no chronology or chronometry. This is the time of a ‘child playing draughts’ (Heraclitus, cited in Kennedy 2013, p. 3). It is the non-Newtonian time– space that Barad refers to in which past and future are not fixed in the present, nor are phenomena located in fixed space and time as in containers, but rather, ‘phenomena are material entanglements enfolded and threaded through the spacetimemattering of the universe’ (Barad 2014, p. 82). Childhood performs as a space– time mattering, existing as a period in sequential time but also as an intensity that is enfolded through life. So, unlike the ‘pervasive rationalization and normalization of stage theory, (which) in its relentless chronologism—sees childhood as over before it begins’ (Kennedy 2013, p. 2), the becoming-child is a virtual future and the potential of newness. The becoming-child is a becoming that is part of the wider becomings of the world and part of the worlding in which we are all implicated. In a ‘rhizomatic pedagogy’ a provocation is offered as an open-ended starting point that may or may not be taken up. Philosophy with Children and the pedagogy of the Community of Philosophical Enquiry depend on puzzlement or disequilibrium provoked by some kind of text, object, question and event. This provocation or starting point starts the process of questioning that leads to the collaborative and creative philosophical work. The broadened notion of reason and inquiry proposed above asks for the processes of science and the arts to be combined. The atelier and the laboratory are two intersecting strategies in Malaguzzi’s writings and carry with them possibilities for exploring the rational and irrational; reality and fantasy; connecting thoughts and bodies in relational journeys of discovery and learning. During my time as a visiting researcher in the preschool, I became a folder of paper aeroplanes. I had shown some children a way to make them, and soon it 3 Not

to be confused with the minority of the 1% or the colonial minority interests mentioned in Chapters Three and Four.

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Fig. 5.5 Friends holding hands

became the favourite teatime and after school pastime. As long as there was paper, the folding would continue, and the throwing games would take on new forms and patterns. Time took on that unmeasured quality associated with aion. Fortunately, some children managed to perfect the folding technique, so the pressure on me lessened. I remembered something else I could do with folded paper: folding and cutting friends holding hands. I made one and it caught on (Fig. 5.5). Vibrant paper, enlivened by scissors, connected with desiring movements and energetic flows. I had also brought along an overhead projector from the university where this technology was slowly becoming obsolete. The paper cut-outs and their possibility for creating shadows, and the projector with its light source and glass surface were an obvious connection (Fig. 5.6). The transformation of the cut-out paper shapes into shadows on the ceiling created an enthusiastic response and simple abstract shapes gained significance once projected. ‘Diamonds!’, ‘Traffic signs’, ‘a crocodile’ (Fig. 5.7). Some shapes were the discarded negative shapes from someone else’s cutting: a possibility created by the close entanglements of bodies and paper and the accumulation of rejected, unused superfluous pieces. A process of composting that is not possible in a tidied-up space where individuals work in isolation on their own identical products. Composting, re-use and re-purposing throws up new thoughts. The tidying-up impulse needs to be contained. Remaining with our desiring, ‘always in the middle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 293), and the ‘muddle’ (Haraway 2016, p. 31) of the process is part of art-making processes that keep us among the untied threads and the porous containers that can be generative of creative thought.

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Fig. 5.6 A muddle of bodies, paper, light, a floor and a ceiling

Fig. 5.7 Shadows, refractions and rainbows

‘There’s a rainbow!’: Someone noticed the diffracted light from the edge of the mirror in the projector that made a thin rainbow on the ceiling. I remembered being shown how to make a rainbow with a mirror in water, so I set this up outside when the children went out to continue their play (Fig. 5.8). The sunlight reflected from the mirror and refracted through the water created light patterns and rainbow colours on the outside wall of the preschool. There was an almost hysterical outburst when the flickering shape took on the form of a caterpillar, which

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Fig. 5.8 The work with shadows and light continues through ‘playtime’

looked just like the silkworms we had been keeping in a shoebox and feeding everyday with mulberry leaves (Figs. 5.9 and 5.10). The intra-active narrative of children, water, sunlight, wall and caterpillar cut across the binaries of rational/irrational and reality/fantasy. The idea and memory of caterpillar materialised in the time–space matter of the entanglement. The way the light formed a shape and moved on the wall was a performance of becoming caterpillar. It is a Deleuzian ‘body without organs’, like an egg: full of potential but with no differentiated cells or solid parts. A language

Fig. 5.9 A caterpillar with rainbow edges appears on the wall

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Fig. 5.10 The emojis on the wall express a heightened level of affect

of crawling, caterpillar locomotion was recognised and the material-discusive literacy was distributed among and between the human and more-than-human assemblage. A frequently practiced artform during outdoor play was the making of chalk drawings on the paved area on the western side of the preschool building. Today the sun was bright and the shadows of bodies invited the tracing of outlines. Noticing the caterpillar-like shapes on the wall, Marla approached teacher Alina with a question: ‘Are the shadows we made on the ceiling the same as the patterns on the wall from the water?’ In other words: What is the difference between a shadow and a reflection? This philosophical and scientific questioning was made possible by the materials in intra-action with the conversations and games we created together as friends and coresearchers. The ‘muddle’ allowed what Peirce called abduction. Connections were being made in all directions and the rhizome-like nature of knowledge and thinking was strongly present. The on-going and open invitation to ask this kind of question is what the ‘establishment of a community of enquiry’ generates. The day we played with cut-out shapes on the overhead projector had an impact in different ways on different children (and adults). Thulani created a fairy with wings that formed a convincing shadow (Figs. 5.11 and 5.12). The shadow of a real three-dimensional fairy would have been very similar. I realised with a shock of recognition why shadow puppetry is so compelling. The philosophical exploration of ‘real’ versus ‘representation’ was enacted among and between child, paper, drawing, scissors and shadow. Mbali and Thulani sadly went on to different primary schools after their Grade R year and their opportunities for playing together were less frequent. My relationship with Mbali’s family meant that I saw her often, so I arranged some play dates for them in consultation with Thulani’s grandmother with whom he lived. When I went to pick him up on one occasion (about six months after the cut-outs session), I found him

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Fig. 5.11 A drawing leaves its page

Fig. 5.12 Shadow fairy story

playing on the floor with a collection of paper dolls he had made. They were carefully drawn, coloured in and cut-out shapes of fairies, mermaids and other visibly female characters. Thulani told me they were ‘people’ and some were ‘fairy teachers’.

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5.4 Learning as Desiring Thulani’s population of paper people is a powerful example of learning as desiring. A well established and deeply felt affinity for fantasy creatures like mermaids and fairies (evidenced by the drawing in my field notes, the leaf construction and the cut-out) gave Thulani the impetus to create a collection of uniformly sized but individually designed units that had the advantage over regular drawings in that they could be arranged and grouped and moved as individual items in space (Fig. 5.13). The power of a cut line to create a separate shape that performs like an individual entity (has a shadow, has variable positions and relationships) was something that seems to have made itself felt on the day he made his first cut-out fairy. I can’t presume to know the extent of the meaning of this process for Thulani and efforts to discuss them have been largely unsuccessful. What is remarkable is the power of a material-discursive practice like this paper-people artform to take hold, gain purchase and invite the engagement of Thulani’s narrative, mathematical, aesthetic and imaginative capabilities in a durational enquiry. The practice becomes an intra-active part of Thulani and Mbali’s play (Figs. 5.14 and 5.15). Ina Semetky’s interpretation of Deleuze’s triad of affective knowledge makes this kind of learning event visible in an ‘image of thought’. In affective knowledgemaking, affect is the connector between percept and concept and this clearly applies to these vignettes of learning as desiring described in this chapter. Abductive reasoning emerges from surprises, chaos and perplexity that produces intensities of affect.

Fig. 5.13 Thulani’s population of mermaids, fairies and fairy teachers

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Fig. 5.14 Thulani and Mbali’s crowd

Thought moves on from this wild abandon to more logical engagements with cause and effect, problem-solving and a purposeful creative production over time. Thulani frequently resisted the criticism he encountered in relation to his choice of female images. He claimed a right to like women’s fashion but rejected a pair of black ballet pumps offered to him by his teacher as being ‘for girls’. Thulani performs gender in innovative ways, resisting the fixed conformity of a particular prescribed sexuality, reminding me of Africa Taylor and Carmel Richardson’s work on ‘queering home corner’ (Taylor and Richardson 2005). Thulani ‘does’ gender in a way that complexifies his maleness and defies easy understanding. He expresses his creative sensitivity to style and whimsy through his manipulation of handy materials. The materials provide a surface on which he writes his unique story. In one of my data video clips he can be seen placing a rag on his head to create a wig and on another occasion, he lifted his heels onto the backs of his shoes to create high heels. He does this with a sense of enjoyment and display. Through a process of learning about himself and his preferences, Thulani plays with embodiment and representation in ways that extend his story-making and agency in his fantastical explorations. Sometime later, when he had moved into the next grade, I saw Thulani again and enquired as to whether he was still making his people. He said he was and added, as if coming upon this idea just then, ‘I can make a boy!’. This unfinished story continues beyond the pages of this book as do the lives of all protagonists who continue their journeys of loving, learning and becoming. A commitment on the part of adults working with young children, to pay attention to the notion of learning as desiring has the potential to change our job descriptions.

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Fig. 5.15 Mbali’s very different style of doll on the left, made in response to her friend’s creations. The mermaid on the right was made by Thulani

The value of mediated, teacher-guided processes is primarily a welcoming invitation, a springboard and an opening up for difference. Importantly, learning as desiring connects the material, embodied, affective and aesthetic aspects of encounters in and with the world, as well as the rational and irrational, real and fantastical life- and thought-worlds. It calls on us as educators to slow down, stay and dwell in the threshold space where each child’s emergent languages of expression can steep and stew. This slowing down allows for an attentive focus on the affects of affect and the differences that differences make. The ‘staying’ is not static: there is movement and change in an on-going becoming-with where teaching is becoming-intensity. My role as researcher (knowing) and my practice of making photographs and video recordings (making) allowed me to slow down, re-turn, re-visit and re-consider (doing). Sharing my research-in-progress with a community of co-researchers through presentations and a webinar gave me a collaborative space in which to re-turn (to) the pedagogical events and with which to diffract further over and through time, space and difference. The practice of documentation and sensory ethnography offer compelling pedagogical and research tools that can become a way of being in the world in which diffraction is not a metaphor but a methodology.

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References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 25–53. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Barclay, H., & Browne, J. (2019). Below the street, in the soil: A journey of becoming in Johannesburg, South Africa. Innovations in early Education: The International Reggio Emilia Exchange, 26(4–15). Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant matter: A political ecology of things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bloch, C. (2006) Theory and Strategy of Early Literacy in Contemporary Africa with Special Reference to South Africa. doi:10.13140/RG.2.1.2794.7765. Browne, J. (2018). Reimagine education: Reggio Emilia inspiration in Africa. Johannesburg: Africa Reggio Emilia Alliance. Cagliari, P., et al. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Br., Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gregory, M. R., Haynes, J., & Murris, K. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge international handbook of philosophy for children. London: Routledge. Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Haynes, J., & Kohan, W. (2018). Facilitating and difficultating: The cultivation of teacher ignorance and inventiveness. In Murris, K. & Haynes, J. (Eds.). Literacies, literature and learning: Reading classrooms differently (pp. 204–221). Routledge. Hellman, A., & Lind, U. (2017). Picking up speed: re-thinking visual art education as assemblages. Studies in Art Education, 58(3), 206–221. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2017.133 1091. Routledge. Hoffmann, M. (1999). Problems with Peirce’s concept of abduction. Foundations of Science, 4(3), pp. 271–305. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1009675824079. Kennedy, D. (1998). Reconstructing childhood. The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 14(1), 29–37. Kennedy, D. (1999). Philosophy for children and the reconstruction of philosophy. Metaphilosophy, 30(4), 338–359. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9973.00142. Kennedy, D. (2012). Rhizomatic curriculum development in community of philosophical inquiry paper. In Santi, M. & Oliverio, S. (Eds.). Educating for complex thinking through philosophical inquiry. Models, advances, and proposals for the New Millennium. Naples: Liguori. Kennedy, D. (2013). Epilogue: Becoming child, becoming other: Childhood as signifier. In A. Muller (Ed.), Childhood in the English Renaissance (pp. 145–153). Trier: Wissenschaftlichter Verlag Trier. Kindler, A. M. (1999). “From endpoints to repertoires”: A challenge to art education. Studies in Art Education, 40(4), 330. https://doi.org/10.2307/1320553. Kindler, A. M. (2004). Researching Impossible? Models of artistic development reconsidered. In Handbook of research and policy in art education (pp. 241–260). New York: Routledge. Kindler, A. M. (2010). Art and art in early childhood : What can young children learn from “a/art activities ?” International Art in Early Childhood Research Journal, 2(1), 1–14. Retrieved from http://artinearlychildhood.org/artec/images/article/ARTEC_2010_Research_Journal_1_A rticle_1.pdf. Kohan, W. (2014). Philosophy and childhood: Critical perspectives and affirmative practices. New York: Springer.

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Chapter 6

Writing with the Park

This time, it is in order to join with the forces of the future, cosmic forces. One launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it. One ventures from home on the thread of a tune. Deleuze and Guattari (1987, p. 363)

Abstract The chapter offers some stories of learning experiences that take place in and with the public park close to the preschool by way of an assemblage of image and text. The images are offered as frozen, stop-frame selections from re-turnings, rerunnings, and re-versings of video material. The accompanying text attempts to track or mark particular agential cuts in which video practices have agency. According to Barad, an agential cut is the only possible description of reality: it is a mapping of an intra-action within a phenomenon that makes no claim to universal or essential truth. The intra-acting visual and verbal notes are propositions for working in experimental ways with and among human and non-human forces in education.

Alina, the Grade R teacher, took the children to the adjacent public park several times a week during their play time. As a Haraway-inspired mutated-modest-witness already part of and implicated in the events I witness, and in a cyborg form of humanwith-camera, I/we dance among the intra-actions and entanglements of space–time to find new multi-sensory narratives of learning and becoming. I diffract Barad’s notions of difference and diffraction, both spatial and temporal, with Deleuze and Guattari’s lyrical refrain: the sing-song same-same rhythmic repetitions that re-iterate and reassure but that also, in their sameness, draw attention to the tiny changes and the spaces in-between that allow the unexpected and the new and unanticipated to enter. Since modernism removed the visible traces of time from our environment it is now only visible on clocks where it can be regularised, made strictly chronological and also can be bought (Lefebvre 1984). Barad wants us to recognise time as ‘phenomenal’ and agential just as space is. The past is not gone and irretrievable and fixed. It is present now and implicated in the present and the future and produced differently and intra-actively ‘in the making of phenomena’ (Barad 2014, p. 181). In venturing outside one leaves the order of the home space which was created to provide © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_6

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stillness and safety (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 362). While this order always has the potential for disorder and change, the striations of the school and its systems are powerful material-discursive controls. Time in the park is made possible by the ‘free’ space allocated on the ‘daily program’ that hangs on the wall exerting its order on the day. To some extent, in the park, one contends more often with the disorder of chaos, and the world ‘worlding’ (Barad 2007, p. 392): one part of the world making itself known to another part (Barad 2007, p. 335). It is important not to see the attention to the park space as a move into a dualism of inside and outside—both are mutually constituted and are always folding into one another. Thresholds are important middle spaces made possible by the movement from one to the other and the intra-action of the shades or variations of inside-ness and outside-ness, further complicated by the outside of the inside and the inside of the outside. Movement and energies in all of these kinds of spaces are constantly decoding and recoding—ordering (into striations) and going off on lines of flight (smoothing out). Quantum physics undoes the notion of inside/outside, and of scale, as it shows the tiniest part of the universe, ‘a force extending a mere millionth of a billionth of a meter in length’ (Barad 2017, p. 63) reaching ‘global proportions’ and destroying entire cities. Energy and time are forces that can disrupt all our comfortable Newtonian explanations about place and time and the sequential processes of cause and effect. Here I offer some stories of learning experiences that take place in and with the public park close to the preschool by way of an assemblage of image and text. The images are offered as frozen, stop-frame selections from re-turnings, re-runnings, and re-versings of video material. The accompanying text attempts to track or mark particular agential cuts in which video practices have agency. According to Barad, an agential cut is the only possible description of reality: it is a mapping of an intraaction within a phenomenon that makes no claim to universal or essential truth. The intra-acting visual and verbal notes are propositions for working in experimental ways with and among human and non-human forces in education. I explore the affordance of a park as a place of potential, change, chaos and virtuality rather than as the ‘natural’ antidote to too much concrete, indoor-time and stale air. Parks and gardens have featured strongly in the early childhood discourse either as Fröbelian representations of ‘nature’, innocence, purity and growth (Taylor 2011) or as a source of curative physical activity and controlled security surveillance (Knight 2016). These notions of ‘park-as-nature’ position us all (me, the teacher and the children) as outside of ‘nature’ or the ‘world’. What becomes visible through this diffractive account is an intra-active curriculum: a thinking-with-the-park where desire leads and connects human and non-human in a mutually affecting and constantly emergent world(ing) (Thiele 2014, p. 208). For Barad, diffraction is a concept that connects and makes noticeable the way the world works as an integrated and unified entanglement of forces. Her famous example of waves behaving both as collections of particles and also as ‘disturbances’ (Barad 2010, p. 252) helps to make this concept clearer. Waves meet other waves and become different and cause different patterns of disturbance but can still be measured as individual particles (by a particular device). Events and entities both macro and micro, inside and outside, living and non-living are all implicated in the on-going becoming of the world and the universe (one or many).

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Diffraction as a concept is about our taking on our always changing subjectivities (in relation), responding to what these connected subjectivities mean and acting ethically within these relationships. Ontology (being) cannot be separated from epistemology (knowing) or from ethics (doing). Worlding with Barad and becoming worldly with Haraway are both ways of recognising our inseparability as a ‘becoming together’ on and with our shared planet. Haraway’s biological sciences perspective starts from an inter-species ‘with-ness’ (Giugni 2011, p. 11) while Barad’s quantum physics framing takes the behaviour of particles as an entry point. Both demand that we acknowledge that human creatures (and the cells, chemicals and atoms of which we are made) cannot be afforded ‘other’ or outside status. This ‘objective’ outsider status, often referred to as a Cartesian subject, positions (some) humans as separate and superior knowers, knowing the world as outside and distinct and unaffected by the impacts of their/our knowledge producing machinery. A posthumanist and new materialist onto-epistemology has more in common with the in-between of Taoist ontology of the ‘flux of oneness’ (Wu et al. 2018, p. 152) than the rational fixed ontology of western scientificism. Being and knowing are entangled and part of the worlding of our shared becoming. Our becoming is always a becoming different in relation with. Difference cannot be about defining and comparing individual freestanding things and beings, because this exercise is meaningless in a relational ontology. The single ‘being’ is never a single being (even humans are percentage-wise more microbe than human genetically and atomically) as it is in the particular time–space mattering of an event or phenomenon that creates a contingent ‘diffracted’ subjectivity. Rather the issue is ‘How to live a world of difference(s), a world in/as ongoing differentiation, in such ways that the outcome is not ever more separation and antagonism, exclusion and the fear of others, but so that new senses of commonality are envisioned?’ (Thiele 2014, p. 202). We are of the world, the universe, and like all other parts of it, we can and do impact profoundly on the conditions for one another’s being and becoming. It matters that diffraction is central to the methodology put to work in this writing and the research that generated it.

6.1 Dancing with Letters One morning in September of 2015, I accompany the class and their teacher on a visit to the park. The class come here often as it is actually their ‘back yard’, only a fence and a gate separate their centre from this public space. All of the children start to run immediately we are in the space. Some do cartwheels and forward rolls (Figs. 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3). There is a slope on one side of the park and this means that one can lie down and roll down the slope (Fig. 6.4). This brings delight and shrieks. An aeroplane flies overhead. The noise of the aeroplane combined with the thrill of rolling down the grassy slope creates what Dewey would call ‘an experience’ and for Barad—this is one part of the world making itself known to another, a monist intra-activity of affect.

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Fig. 6.1 Handstand with froggy shadow

Fig. 6.2 Blurry leg

The world worlding. The teacher notices how the children are taken by this moment and she concurs: ‘Wow, that was exciting!’. My camera is turned on but I am not only being photographer, making photographs. As I engage with questions and conversations, losing my focus on filming or photographing, the camera continues to record visuals and sound, just as my lungs continue to breathe. After a day in the ‘field’, I download all the photos and video clips. My computer saves them in numbered sequence. Over time I view

6.1 Dancing with Letters

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Fig. 6.3 Hoodie cartwheel

Fig. 6.4 Rolling down/with a grassy slope

and review the clips and still photographs and select the pictures that I think are worth saving. Two pictures caught my eye: One is of three children drawing together in the sand. Some of the marks made in the sand are recognisable as letters of the alphabet, others look abstract. The other picture that stood out was the picture of the grey cement table with the thin spidery lines making up an A and an M. This photographic image works differently the real object did, flattened as it is now against the picture plane or paper surface. It has the allure of ancient Roman graffiti or Northern

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Cape rock engravings. There is something ancient and precious about these children’s marks: ancient in that the signs have come down the ages although now they are being repeated as fresh, new and exciting discoveries. The texture and colour of the weathered cement table has a surprising beauty and subtleness. I consider which clips I think I should transcribe. I create stills from some of the video clips to help me to identify narrative sequences I can work with. Sometimes I give the clips descriptive titles so that they are easier to locate. Re-turning (to) some of the video footage, I hear voices that come from outside of the camera’s view that I had previously not noticed. I am accustomed to favouring the visual aspect of video and now am forced to listen more carefully, replay the footage and decipher the audio content, much of which has been incorporated without my knowledge or choosing. The apparatus offers me new views of a past that is not fixed but returning in new ways. The video footage gives me access to events which at the time were peripheral to my view and consciousness. As I re-turn to the series of short clips I made over that one day, I un-do my selections and re-make connections between them and a chronology rewinds. A story begins to emerge from the digital material. The ‘voices off’ in the earliest piece of video mark the beginning of Marla’s enquiry into the mysteries of writing, ‘I found a pen!’. In another section of video I hear her voice again: ‘Do you know how to do an ‘A’?’ The vignette that initially drew my attention was the scene with the three girls drawing in the sand and then dancing together before leaving the park to return to the Centre. I had manually transcribed this one short piece and became familiar with it. Gradually the connections between it and the other clips appear like invisible writing revealed by a flame. The drawing on the table is connected to the drawing in the sand. The discovery of the pen and the paper started a whole story off. It began with one child and drew in her friends. It held her attention throughout the cartwheels and bolamakisi (head-over-heels) and even through the game of duck, duck, goose.

6.2 Re-turning with Marla and Paper: The Marla Paper Assemblage ‘I found a pen!’, Marla says, excitedly, showing me her treasure. ‘Should I hold it for you? Oh, its broken’, I say. Ballpoint pens are usually not made available for children to write with in the Grade R year. Their writing is limited to writing their name on their artwork and usually with pencil. Some teachers favour wax crayon as form of control as no attempts and exploratory marks can be erased. Marla is not giving up on this pen that has arrived unsolicited into her hands, even if it is oozing ink. Marla notices a piece of white paper floating past. It calls to her in its whiteness, its flatness, its rightness for her literacy desiring pen. This is its ‘thing-power’ (Bennett 2010); its capacity to affect. In Baradian terms, Marla and pen become a phenomenon of intra-acting agency. She responds, catches it and tries to write (Figs. 6.5, 6.6 and 6.7).

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Fig. 6.5 Chasing paper

Fig. 6.6 Writing playground

Friends and paper and pen. Marla’s connection with the pen draws in her friend who becomes part of the assemblage for a while. At what point does she ask me if I know how to do an ‘A’? Can I write on a leaf? Who else did she ask? (Fig. 6.8). She finds another piece of paper—a label or package of some kind. The flotsam of consumerist urban living is rich treasure for a wording worlding humanpen assemblage (Fig. 6.9).

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Fig. 6.7 Paper pen friends

Fig. 6.8 Writing on a leaf

The children are all called together to play a game of ‘duck duck goose’. Marla and the pen are still intensely connected and cannot be disengaged. Unlike the intense speeding up of the discovery of the pen, this is a slower consolidating time. Marla sits still, her whole body focused on her important new tool, now a part of her cyborg becoming-writer. Her hour in the park has been taken over by this pen. The disturbance of her state is not due to the pen, but rather to the in-between of Marla and the pen. The affect causes disturbance, things are not the same. The smooth and

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Fig. 6.9 Packaging as writing surface

the striated spaces of curriculum are not discrete and separate, but flow and change one into the other. The game of duck duck goose coordinates the movements of all the children and precedes their return to the more formal space of the preschool building. It draws on the schooling they have received with regard to responding to instructions, making a circle, controlling their individual impulses. These are the striations of a structured pedagogy (Fig. 6.10).

Fig. 6.10 Duck duck goose matters less

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Fig. 6.11 Park table holding hands

The park table, a flat-textured surface, invites Marla to try out her letters. She defends her hold on the pen from one of the boys who tries to snatch it away: ‘It’s mine!’ she claims. Not so much possession or ownership as a cyborg becoming. She and her friend, Mbali, make letters on the table (Figs. 6.11 and 6.12). Marla has painfully short, bitten nails and her fingers on her right hand are now stained with the marks of a writer. My impulse is to psychologise and pathologise and to assign a cause for this effect (nail biting caused by stress and always definable in terms other than normal, healthy and complete). This urge is disrupted by my own sense of the complex material-discursive phenomenon that is nail biting, as nail biter myself. I consider the complex intra-action of inside and outside that produce the conditions that result in nail biting. They are intense affects that produce material results. I choose instead to acknowledge and appreciate Marla’s capacity for intensity. Her urgent and intense relation with the pen today is another expression of her ‘capacity to affect and be affected’ by what she encounters. ‘Spinoza asks: What can a body do? We call the latitude of a body the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power, or rather within the limits of that degree. Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, pp. 299–300 emphasis in the original). In this way, both her capacity for action and her connection with the things around her make her who she is in this event. The concept of molecular becoming that Deleuze and Guattari (1987) explore at length in their chapter entitled ‘1730: Becoming

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Fig. 6.12 Table as writing surface

intense, becoming animal, becoming-imperceptible’ uses a non-Cartesian, Spinozist ontology in which qualities of bodies and objects can only be expressed in relation to what they do: ‘A race-horse is more different from a workhorse than a workhorse is from an ox’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 257). The longitude of the body is the name given to ‘the particle aggregates belonging to that body in a given relation; these aggregates are part of each other depending on the composition of the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of the body’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p. 256). An individuated assemblage coheres with Barad’s intra-actions that ‘cut togetherapart (in one movement)’ (Barad 2011, p. 125). The entangled phenomenon is an assemblage of elements that produce one another through the relation, none of them pre-existing the event. The impulse to interpret the event in the park as expressions of individual identities, abilities, personalities, or interests and intentions of particular children misses the flow of immanence that continually creates the world in its infinite and endless possible actualisations. Murris, drawing on Deleuzian concepts of subjectivity, makes the subjective ‘I’ into the multiple, always already implicated, communal ‘iii’ of a body without organs (Murris 2016).1 This dismembered and ‘(in)determinate’ subject is one (many) that is (are) not located within an individual who has claim to one identity, his or her own intention, or singular voice. Rather, ‘agency and intentionality… are always produced in relation with material discursive human and nonhuman others’ (Murris 2016, p. 31). The habit of always beginning with ‘I’ is a legacy of a Cartesian ontology of subject/object binaries in which we 1 The

grey text (iii) indicating the unboundedness of a trans-individuality.

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name the self ‘I’, ‘a self, apart from other selves and things’ (Lenz Taguchi 2010, p. 57). Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ falls away as thought is distributed among and between, rather than inside one mind. The child and the writer are in co-productive relation. Writer becomes child and child becomes writer in parts. The pen-holding fingers and the hand-eye of the writer take away molecules from the dancing child. In an intra-active assemblage of Barad, Bennet and Deleuze and Guattari, the thing-power of the pen and the molecular becoming-writer interferes with the child dancing. What can fingers do? Fingers can be bitten, and fingers can hold pens and become blue with ink. Fingers can also do friendship. Marla and Mbali hold each other’s fingers in a tentative sign of closeness in a beginning friendship emerging in their shared thinking with the park (Fig. 6.11). The imposition of a system of verbal, written culture onto the hundred languages of orality, movement and dance, drawing, and friend-making seems like a kind of violence. Many early years teachers claim that parents put pressure on them to get their children writing long before their Grade R year. Student teachers return from their teaching experience placements with reports of three-year-olds sitting at tables for most of the school day. While corporal punishment is illegal, punitive practices are rife (Murris 2013). The normalisation of sitting at tables for extended periods may seem to an adult like a mild form of discomfort but is a harsh form of restraint and a gross violation of the purpose of education. The material-discursive power of the school readiness agenda is a diffraction of future time in the present. The downward force of literacy is a force from future time that intensifies Marla’s capacity to enact her literacy moves for better or for worse. The discourse of preparation and ‘readiness’ materially affects Marla and her intra-active becomings with the children, park, the pen, the table and the sand. The three girls move to the sandy patch near the table. Human and non-human intra-actions speed up and slow down the intensities of engagement. Speeded up moments of thrilling new discovery are interspersed with slower less intense gatherings of thought, re-doing and doing differently again. Marks in the sand. Sticks work well as writing tools and there are more of them to go around. All three girls now draw together. What comes first? The letters or the images? First letters then images (Figs. 6.13 and 6.14). The letter is abandoned. Mbali draws a girl with long hair: a familiar visual refrain. Khethiwe says she is drawing a king. We are now in the world of princesses, princes and kings. How does a princess dance? You need a prince. Who will be the prince? Oracy returns to the intra-action. I am struck by the ease at which the girls move from their stick drawing to their storying, to their dancing (Figs. 6.15 and 6.16). The elegant expressiveness of Marla’s movements in her solo dance contrast so strongly with the more constrained and contained movements I see in the tight spaces indoors and in her intense, perhaps anxious ‘literacy desiring’ (Kuby and Rucker 2016) here in the park that limits her movements to eye and hand and fingers.

6.2 Re-turning with Marla and Paper: The Marla Paper Assemblage

Fig. 6.13 Writing in the sand

Fig. 6.14 Drawing a girl

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Fig. 6.15 Dancing with the park 1

Fig. 6.16 Dancing with the park 2

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6.3 Refrain: Cutting Together-Apart—Otherwise/Again The girls end their park-ing with this dance and we go back inside. In this thinkingwith; writing-with; drawing-with the park, the lightness of this teacher’s hold on the curriculum makes this encounter possible. She has left spaces or cracks for the incidental and the unexpected to enter. She is assisted by this space just next door. It is always there but always different, in ways that are beyond her control or choosing. The arrival of a pen on this occasion set off a string of events for Marla and her friends and for me. Their assemblage of desire propelled them into the flow of intensity that waxed and waned and moved location around the park. For others there were parallel events going on unnoticed by me and my camera. The becoming-dancer and becoming-prince enter in a defiant sense and nonsense-making (Wohlwend et al. 2017) that reasserts the power of a ‘hundred hundred’ languages (Malaguzzi, no date). The park is not a definable feature in a city with predetermined qualities like ‘nature’, ‘play space’, ‘fresh air’. The park and everything in it—plants, creatures, equipment and people—constitute an infinite number of intra-active phenomena with fluid and changing characteristics and the capacity to make ‘child’ intelligent. If we can make a cut to see the disturbance patterns that are created when parts come together and make themselves known to one another, and specifically these children, their teacher and this park space, we can appreciate the complex workings of a park-preschool assemblage as a material-discursive assemblage of learning. This is a ‘worlding’ of which we are all a part, in our fully natural cultural becomings, part of and response-able for and with one another. Moving backwards and forwards and making different stops along the way in both directions with the footage gives me as researcher a view of the event and child that is repeatedly new. New virtualities are created in the in-between of my intense latitudinal capacity to respond with and to the digital material, camera apparatus, and photoshop software and my extensive longitudinal connectivity with the park, the children, their teacher, schooling and research. The ‘hundred hundred’ multisensory and multi-modal ways that children encounter and engage with literacy and becoming-literate are also the ways that this learning works for me as researcher: the video material invites me to diffract practice, experience and memory through time, through theory and through the superposition of waves of viewings, re-viewings, re-turnings, re-workings and re-writings: creating rhythmic refrains of becomingwriter/researcher, not yet finished. This chapter draws attention to an enacted ethics of worlding: a relational and response-able positioning within the phenomenon of child/park/literacy/researcher. This positioning or ‘cut’ was made with the apparatus of videography and through an acknowledgement of the entangled and co-constituting subjectivities of the human and non-human, animate and inanimate elements that make up the world of which we are a part. Current literacy teaching practices are part of a large and powerful apparatus whose boundaries need to be clearly mapped. This diffractive account joins

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up with the activist moves of scholars in the field who have taken up an ethico-ontoepistemology. Both the micro and macro worlds of one day in/with the park, and a global and historical human-centred pattern of teaching and learning and becoming literate are made visible through the use of the apparatus that is children-park-cameraresearcher-teacher.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206. Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 25–53. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Barad, K. (2017). Of Matter and Meaning, 41(3), 431–441. Bennett, J. (2010).Vibrant Matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Br., Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Giugni, M. (2011). “Becoming worldly with”: An encounter with the early years learning framework. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 12(1), 11–27. https://doi.org/10.2304/ciec.2011. 12.1.11. Knight, L. (2016). Playgrounds as sites of radical encounters: Mapping material, affective, spatial, and pedagogical collisions. Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 13–28). New York: Peter Lang. Kuby, C. R., & Rucker, T. G. (2016). Go be a writer!: Expanding the curricular boundaries of literacy learning with children. New York: Teachers College Press. Lefebvre, H. (1984). The production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge. Malaguzzi, L. (no date). The hundred languages of children. Retrieved from www.innovativeteach erproject.org/reggio/poem.php. Murris, K. (2013). The epistemic challenge of hearing child’s voice. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 32(3), 245–259. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9349-9. Murris, K. (2016). The Posthuman child: Educational transformation through philosophy with picturebooks. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315718002. Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the “nature” of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0907568211404951. Thiele, K. (2014). Ethos of diffraction: New paradigms for a (post)humanist ethics. Parallax, 20(3), 202–216. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927627. Taylor & Francis. Wohlwend, K. E., et al. (2017). Making sense and nonsense: Comparing mediated discourse and agential realist approaches to materiality in a preschool makerspace. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 17(3), 444–462. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468798417712066. Wu, J., et al. (2018). Perturbing Possibilities in the Postqualitative Turn: Lessons from Taoism (道) and Ubuntu. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(6), 504–519. https:// doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2017.1422289. Routledge.

Chapter 7

B(e)aring Wit(h)ness

Memory—the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity—is written into the fabric of the world Barad (2011, p. 146). Awaking on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth Plaatje (1920, p. 1).

Abstract The pedagogical documentations or narratives about the ‘phenomenon’ of children in the preschool and park are entangled with the complexities and challenges relating to equitable early childhood education provision in South Africa and to the availability of adequate play spaces for children in the blighted urban landscapes of Johannesburg. Multiple stories connect materially through space and time through a series of events that occur on a day in September in an urban park. The author’s own ‘becoming’ as learner-with-the-park, researcher and writer draws her to become witness to the violent pasts that are folded into the present and into the spaces of the city. This diffraction-as-method makes visible the on-going reverberations and fault lines of colonialism and apartheid in the social, spatial and economic formations affecting children today.

Worlding with the park is an on-going pedagogical adventure and unfolds in unexpected ways for all of us implicated in the burgeoning narrative. As a researching visitor among this lively community of learners my purposeful practice is to glean from events the new lines of flight, ideas, insights, questions and discoveries made by the children. But they are not the only learners here. Increasingly, I am aware of my own changing becoming self, finding new thoughts sparked by our daily forays into being together with each other and with the space that is the preschool and park. This park is familiar to me although components of it are changed. It has prevailed as a public space since before the watershed moment of 27 April, 1994. The area, once a white suburb in a racially divided society, is now ‘free’. Apartheid is gone but inequalities remain. In the Fig. 7.1, the placard reads: Mandela, Apartheid is nie klaar nie, translated from Afrikaans: Mandela, Apartheid is not finished.

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_7

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Fig. 7.1 Cleaners (Transvaal Garment Workers Union) marching for higher wages. William Matlala, 1994. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Taking a cue from Nxumalo, I position myself as ‘mutated modest witness’ (Haraway 1997). I diffract with intersecting and co-constructed narratives of imagined/entangled histories of the park with a ‘storying’ of ‘everyday pedagogical encounters’ (Nxumalo 2016, p.1). Rather than claiming the objective view of an independent, autonomous knower, claiming a ‘culture of no culture’ (Haraway 1997, p. 32). Gayatri Spivak suggests that we do our ‘homework’, by plotting the coordinates of our ontological and epistemological positions and relations (Spivak, cited in Sundberg 2014). The challenge offered by post- and decolonial scholars and in particular by Barad’s feminist physics/philosophy is to find ways to be ‘responsible/response-able—to the thick tangles of spacetimematterings that are threaded through us’ (Barad 2014, p. 184). The histories of this particular place tell stories of movement and change. Time leaves traces in a multitude of layers and scales in the realm of life. Everything is time. Stone, tree, mountain, ocean; thoughts, doubts, clouds – we are time. (Trinh, cited in Barad 2014, p. 184)

Before 1994 the ‘approved’ black users of this park would have been predominantly the ‘nannies’ of the white children of the suburb. These white children, visible in this photograph from 1975, are now adults roughly my age (Fig. 7.2). They, and their own children, are visibly absent in the park we visit now in 2015.

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Fig. 7.2 Inner-city park. Gideon Mendel, 1985. Photograph courtesy of the artist

A cosmic coordination of forces brought colonial government to an end. Generations of sacrifice and resistance and emerging global geopolitical realities were entangled in the moment that turned the tide.

7.1 A Haunting Ontology The triumphal declaration by the neoliberal economist Francis Fukuyama on the ‘end of history’ after the fall of the Berlin wall, prompted Derrida to name ten plagues of global capital. These include new forms of under- and unemployment, migration and deportation, organised crime, the arms trade, the increase in nuclear weapons. The untruth of the claim of the neoliberal ideal expounded by Fukuyama haunts its naming. In a conference named ‘Whither Marxism’ held in April 1993, Derrida dedicated his presentation to the South African Communist, Chris Hani, assassinated earlier that same month. A play on the word, ontology, Derrida follows the concept of the spectre mentioned by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to produce a hauntology that disrupts the linear concepts of history and progress. For justice, as a concept, to exist there must be an indeterminacy, an unfinished-ness about events. To haunt does not mean to be present, and it is necessary to introduce haunting into the very construction of a concept. Of every concept, beginning with the concepts of being and time. That is what we would be calling here a hauntology (Derrida 1994, p. 161)

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Wood (2019) proposes that we add an eleventh plague: that of the climate crisis (Derrida quickly gave a nod to this insightful suggestion). Wood notes that this is not just another addition to the list of plagues, but rather, it is ‘at the heart of the first ten’. Even then, the list is not complete. A plague still missing, he adds, is what he calls the animal holocaust, connected both to the first ten and to the environmental/climate crisis. Hauntology does not only work with pasts: we are also haunted by our futures. Some of these phantoms are the dreams of the few in which robots and driverless cars abound. Satellites make connectivity seamless and babies are ordered from a catalogue. These ghosts are fading as the dependability of endless progress, economic growth and improvement becomes tarnished by the impending calamities of rising temperatures and the extinction of increasing numbers of insect and other animal species. The future is not what it was. (Wood 2006, p. 274)

Barad materialises the ‘hauntology’ of Derrida to produce a creative re-turning of quantum physics and her time–space mattering with notions of justice and responseability. Quantum reality does not follow a separate set of laws from the rest of reality and therefore the queer behaviour of electrons can tell us things about the way time works with space and matter in the world. In Meeting the universe halfway, Barad (2007) suggests that the way that energy enlivens atoms, cannot be accounted for by Newtonian time/space positioning. Nils Bohr was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of the ‘photon’, a quantum of light. According to the theories of physics, atoms, the smallest unit of matter (now visible with powerful electron microscopes) have a nucleus at their centre and electrons charged with energy around them. Electrons are positioned at particular energy levels. They change energy levels but are either at one level of energy or at the other. They are never in-between (Barad 2010, p. 246). If they change to a lower energy state, then they emit a photon of light (the range of colour of this light depends of the type of atom it is). The urge to measure the gradual losing of energy as the electron moves from a higher state of energy to a lower one is confounded by reality because as proven by Bohr, they are never inbetween. Even more confusing is the fact that energy is constant before and after the electron changes position, and therefore the question about when exactly the photon was emitted defies any logical answer. This is what is known as a ‘quantum leap’, although it seems there is no leap as such. Ghostly presences are our best explanations for nature’s queer behaviour and the infinite possibilities that linger on the fringes of material presence. Newtonian confidence is unsettled by this theory of reality in which things are undefinable and indeterminate and declare themselves only in (impermanent) relationality. So not only is ‘identity’ undermined but also our familiar notion of time. We need to factor time in as a co-constituting aspect of phenomena. Barad writes not only about the behaviour of atoms but also about the survivors of the atomic blasts in Japan who visit the desert on New Mexico where the bomb was made. The physics of the bomb-building are materially and ethically entangled with

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the affected lives and cells of human and non-human, plant, animal and other bodies radiated in the blast. Barad’s diffractive methodology takes her on multi-directional science/art performative quests. The queer performance of atoms and electrons are diffracted with queer politics, literature and the reverberations of wartime explosions. The disciplinary boundaries between the sciences and the humanities seem like diabolical defence constructions also blown to smithereens. Reading tales of these more-than-human intra-active phenomena of destruction, devastation, neglect and waste, it is human and animal flourishing that draw my attention and empathy. Initially, my sense of the hauntology of the Joburg Park was through stories of human-centred migratory shifts in population and the idea of the colonial city with its leisure spaces, now so important for very different kinds of living. Attuning myself to both time and material as inseparable aspects of space, the park initiates a post anthropocentric re-turning. Noticing and acknowledging the underneath of the earth as equally part of our world, especially as part of the story of the founding of the city as a mining town, I encountered new and surprising connections to dangerous and disturbing stories of ecological disaster. Anthropology and the environmental humanities offer interdisciplinary ways for meeting our queer and contradictory worlds ‘halfway’. Using the Anthropocene as a working term, Tsing (2015) follows the trans global lives and worlds of mushrooms on the ragged edges of late capitalist and migrant worlds where human and more-thanhuman find unexpected treasures in neglected deforested places. In an edited volume, entitled ‘The arts of living on a damaged planet’, together, she and fellow editors, Swanson, Brubant and Gan, invite explorations into messy, mixed up multi-species ‘monsters’ and diffracted pasts presents and futures. Science and the imagination are both required to track these ‘more than human rhythms’ that reverberate across our landscapes (Tsing et al. 2017, p. G12).

7.2 Movements, Traces and Sedimentations My pedagogical documentations or narratives about this phenomenon of children in the preschool and park are entangled with the complexities and challenges relating to equitable early childhood education provision in South Africa and to the availability of adequate play spaces for children in the blighted urban landscapes of Johannesburg specifically. Multiple stories connect materially through space and time through a series of events that occur on a different day in September in the park. The photograph above of the woman with two children in a city park is entangled with another city space: the prison. In the 1950s the Number four prison was a prison filled on any given day with pass law offenders. Would-be citizens were made into criminals by (the lack of) a rubber stamp. This park would have been ‘out of bounds’ for black people, particularly adults. They required official permission to be working (or walking) in this area. Their passbook with the correct and up-to-date stamp was to be carried on one’s person at all times. The South African ID document is now carried by all citizens above the age of eighteen. But many residents in this inner-city

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suburb do not qualify. Migration seems to be the most common local story and one that continues today. Migration is always already the story of the suburb. The earliest hunter gatherer communities (the ‘San’, the nomadic herders (known as Khoi)) and later, agropastoralists, have left signs of their extended and varied presences, mainly in the form of stone tools, pottery and stone walling. Colonising European farmers and trekboers1 moved into Koi and San territory and the engagement was one of confrontation, conflict and competition (Yates et al. 1990). The global migrations prompted by the gold rush affected this area in the 1900 s and laid the foundation of the city as we know it. The 1913 Natives Land Act prohibited Black South Africans from buying or hiring land in 93% of the country. It effectively pushed Black farmers off their land and off land they may have been leasing as tenant farmers, and into employment. Sol Plaatje, author of the second quotation that opens this chapter, was a scholar, journalist, linguist and politician. As the first secretary general of the South African Native National Congress, later named the African National Congress, he travelled to Britain with his colleagues to make an unsuccessful protest to the King about the Land Act. Current migration patterns are due to disruptions of various kinds on the continent and elsewhere. Amongst those arriving in the country are people from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Somalia, all of which have witnessed decades of war, environmental and economic devastation. The inner city of Johannesburg is a gathering place for African migrants and refugees from more than twenty different countries many of whom have harrowing tales of homes destroyed, hazardous journeys and divided families. The lack of a South African identity document, or an up-to-date refugee document can mean arrest and deportation.

7.3 Learning with Trees There is a mature tree in the park which has areas of its trunk exposed where bark is missing. The children’s imaginations construct these as a ‘door’ where the shape is an arch shape and ‘bums’ where the exposed area is at five-year-old bottom height (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). I asked a number of the children about what the space in the bark looked like and they agreed it was ‘bums’. This was obviously a part of their shared discourse in which the trees and their own human bodies were recognised for their corporeal affinity. The empathetic response to my need for explanation was, ‘Because it’s lost its covering’, bringing associations of being dressed and undressed and publicly exposed. The removal of this layer allows us to see into the inside of the tree, its intimate self. It does not bleed, as children do, but the bark covering the tree is a protective layer and if the entire circle of bark had been removed, the tree would have died. This conversation works in interdisciplinary ways and diffracts natural 1 The

trekboere were farmers of predominantly Dutch descent who migrated away from British control that had been imposed on the Cape by the end of the eighteenth century.

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Fig. 7.3 Tree with bum

Fig. 7.4 Tree and person, bum to bum

science concepts (skin, phloem, protective layer) through the anthropocentrically focused socio-cultural or child-rights notions of exposure, shame and exploitation. This account is increasingly about my own learning about the pedagogies of worlding. The negotiation of shifting boundaries (private and public, inside and outside, human and tree, science and humanities) enters as a new thought about this tree and these marks of violence and humiliation. The children drew me into their thinking with

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their surroundings. The connections made between the children and the park make their shared culture and discourse materially present. Following thoughts and concepts, rather than chasing the humanising push of wanting to teach and improve and fix every pedagogical opportunity, I take on the ‘concept as method’ of Colebrook (2010) and Lenz Taguchi (2010). They invite me to slow down, reorient. The concepts of ‘bum’ and ‘covering’ invite a speculative thinking-with-tree that allows me to move beyond the humanist and child-centred ‘teachable moment’ in which I can deliver instruction about the structure and function of phloem and xylum in plants in a natural science disciplinary mode or to moralise about modesty. Following the ideas, thoughts and concepts that emerge, rather than following the individualised and age-defined child, is the ‘concept as method’ that Lenz Taguchi invokes. My ‘concept as pedagogy’ is the uneasy and unknown territory that can be navigated with Philosophy with Children and the community of enquiry and the practice of the atelierista and the ‘worried and hopeful’ re-figured modest witness who keeps things open and unsettled. In the curriculum for Foundation Phase children in South Africa, a third of the curriculum (less than 30% of time allocation) is allocated to life skills which encompasses the vast content areas of the arts, the sciences, history, geography, physical education, personal and social wellbeing. Languages and numeracy get the lion’s share of time and attention and together are allocated 70% of curriculum time. The possibilities for transdisciplinary enquiry-based work (including language and numeracy) in life skills are rich, but tend to get far less attention than the more instruction-based phonics and number work (Murris et al. 2018, p. 16). If we rely on enlightenment science and Newtonian optics, we would require dissection or X-ray technologies to get beneath the surface of skin to gain any meaningful facts (Gould and Purcell 2000). A microscope or magnifying glass could allow us a closer more probing look at the exodermis of the tree trunk, or the topsoil. Maps and satellite images may reveal the geological and ecological patterns that play across this landscape. What if we allow the thoughts that arrive to grow into speculative propositions connecting bum with mine; skin with earth? Foucault’s genealogy of schooling connects it with the performance of surveillance (Dixon 2010) that originated in the eighteenth century prison. A stark and shocking recognition of such intrusive practices are made in my body’s intra-action with this tree’s nakedness. The haunting presence of the Tausa dance2 (Fig. 7.5) performed by black prisoners in the Number four prison is now present for me in the tree’s trouserless-ness. Black prisoners and preschool children share a positionality of otherness in relation to entrenched practices of rational colonial mastery and

2 Bob

Gosani’s photograph shows the courtyard of the Number four prison which is part of the old fort complex in Braamfontein. Initially a Boer fort, it became a British and then an Apartheid prison. The photo was taken in 1954 during a Drum magazine photoshoot on the roof of an adjacent building. The shoot was set up ostensibly to photograph the Johannesburg skyline, but actually for the purpose of gaining access to a view prison yard. The Drum team’s cunning ruse involved a white secretary posing as photographer and distracting the building’s caretaker while Gosani did his work (Sampson, cited in Gillespie 2015).

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Fig. 7.5 Researcher’s drawing from the photograph, Tausa, by Bob Gosani, 1954. Held in Bailey’s African History Archives

undergo similar treatments of surveillance, coercion and humiliation via the institutional practices that manage every aspect of their lives: in the preschool this means eating, sleeping, toileting, speaking, not speaking, sitting, not sitting, moving and keeping still. The tree’s and my knowledge of intrusion and invasion of boundaries of ‘self’, privacy and dignity heighten my sense of the performative and productive brutalities of schooling Nineteenth century applications of earlier evolutionary theories propounded by Stanley Hall and Herbert Spencer proposed that the development of the child mirrors the development of the race. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny was the explanatory phrase. In this racist conception of human growth, linear progress, ‘natural’ development, patterns of ‘becoming’ fully human apply similarly for children and the indigenous ‘other’. Considered closer to nature, children and indigenous peoples needed to be tamed. The equation of childhood with nature and the importance of this nature/culture binary to western notions of progress, development and civilisation produces the child as less than human. Defined scientific stages of maturation are a complex blend of a reified ‘nature’ and recapitulation theory. This normative conception of ‘child’ has long been the focus of extensive research and critique in the early childhood education, psychology and sociology of childhood fields—much of it claiming a post-structuralist or posthumanist position. Increasingly, environmental education scholars in early childhood are drawing on such fields as Black and indigenous geographies and environmental and ecological humanities

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to more radically contextualise and politicise the work of early childhood (Malone 2019; Nxumalo 2019). Liberating both child and adult from the confines of a humanist personhood, this philosophical venture moves beyond critique and opens up new ways of conceptualising the self-in-relation. A posthumanist decolonising stance recognises the inseparability of humans and nature (we are nature and part of nature) and most significantly, our ways of knowing from our ethical choices and shared responsibility for our world. The photograph of the exercise yard of the Number Four prison by Bob Gosani is held in the Bailey’s African History archives and I was granted permission to use the image in my writing. The decision to in/ex/clude the image matters. Tuck and Yang teach a ‘pedagogy of refusal’ (Tuck and Yang 2014, pp. 811–818) in which the academy is denied access to the painful pasts of the subaltern for the purposes of creating settler colonial academic knowledge. Although this image (Tausa) is already in the public domain, its repetition can be seen to be a gratuitous re-enacting of an intrusive and denigrating act. Tuck and Yang offer an alternative in their discussion of the work of artist Ken Gonzales-Day, who works with images of lynchings from the American South (Tuck and Yang 2014, p. 814). He erases the main foreground image of the lynched person, drawing attention to the other parts of the image, the things usually not given importance in the viewing. Taking this lead, I make a drawing from the photograph. I stay with the image in an attentive way. I am surprised as I notice how closely together most of the people are sitting, almost ‘packed’ together, legs enfolding other bodies. I think of the preschool at sleep time. Laid out in rows on the floor are mattresses on which children sleep top to tail like sardines, performing the spatial efficiencies of control. In the Tausa photo I see casual poses and smiles that are out of place. The violence and invasive practice of inspection is ‘normalised’. One of the most noteworthy divergences I made from ‘normalcy’ in the running of the preschool was my refusal to use threats or punishment in my engagements with children. I discovered that a piece of broken Mechano construction toy was often used as a warning when sound levels rose above a certain level or an adult felt they had ‘lost control’. The normalised violence and punishment in teaching and learning is directly related to the broader and central issue of the ‘colonisation’ of childhood. While I was working in the preschool, there was a complaint made against a teacher for hitting a child. Investigations were inconclusive and only a warning was given. The teacher left soon afterwards. The photographic two-dimensional image of the tree in the park (Fig. 7.5) juxtaposes tree surface with ground surface, both flattened against the page. The intrusive ‘tausa’ makes a connection with the intrusions of mining that burrow into and underneath the skin of the earth. The (violent) histories of extraction and intrusion are there and not there at the same time, troubling a metaphysics as presence (through a different optics). Barad invites us to consider that ‘(e)vents and things do not occupy particular positions in space and time; rather, space, time, and matter are iteratively produced and performed’ (Barad 2007, p. 393). The future already threaded through the now: parks are planned with a conception of citizen. The future of this park will be affected by all the possible presents and the possibilities for what will come to matter.

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7.4 Travel-Hopping/Queering Time and Space/Doing My Homework What does the non-clock time of this encounter bring into being? Multi-temporal and scattered spaces need new descriptions. What do I write as a time travelling, ‘travelhopping scribe’? The travel-hopper must risk her sense of self. Travel-hopping, says Barad, as she diffracts a novel written by a survivor of Hiroshima3 through her account of quantum field theory, means ‘tracing the material entanglements: a risky journey of placing one’s body in touch with the matter/materiality of specific colonialist histories’ (Barad 2017, p. 81). For Malaguzzi, inside and outside should be one unified space (Cagliari et al. 2016, p. 229). In dualisms there is always a dominant side (Lenz Taguchi 2010, p. 23). The assumption governing current school architecture is that inside is dominant as legitimate learning space. The forest school swings the opposite way making the outdoors the ideal. If the schoolroom is a colonial construct, how does it work? Like so many representations in educational discourses (Christmas in winter, daffodils in the wild) a northern climate seems to be assumed. The regimentation and control offered by school buildings with ease of separating age-groups, abilities, subjects also work as a powerful representation. Boundaries are distinct and often strictly monitored (you will be noticed when you arrive late). Indigenous forms of architecture are conceptualised as both inside/outside: the courtyard and enclosure an important feature. The stone walling of the early iron-age settlements in this area and all over Southern Africa linked the mud-walled buildings of internal domestic space, creating in-between spaces of inside/outside. A temporal diffraction of patterns of architecture helps to disrupt accepted notions of inside/outside, of now and then, of tomorrow, next year and the next generation. How do parks and gardens work and what energies are at play here? Parks and gardens have featured strongly in the early childhood discourse either as Fröbelian representations of ‘nature’, innocence, purity and growth (Taylor 2011) or as a source of curative physical activity and controlled secure surveillance (Knight 2016). These colonising and anthropocentric perspectives ignore the affordances of park spaces as places of potential, change, chaos and virtuality. What becomes visible through a diffractive account of events is an intra-active curriculum: a thinking-with-the-park where desire leads and connects human and non-human in a mutually affecting and constantly emergent worlding. From the entanglements of rural pastoral life the nineteenth century saw large numbers of men swallowed into the subterranean incarceration of the mine where they became autonomous, interchangeable parts of massive global mineral-producing machine. For women, there was either the single-handed raising of children and grand-children, or the servicing of white families (often caring for children while having to leave one’s own children in the care of another). Miners extracted a high value commodity which remained unobtainable to them but which offered a way to survive. They became wage-slaves, without political rights: having no say in 3 Kyoko

Hayashi (2010) From trinity to trinity, Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press.

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the decisions that affected their lives. Apartheid effected a complete undoing of families. Disenfranchised and disinherited, most black people were landless, and had no vote. As if forgetting this troubled history, our constitution offers a supposedly new zero, a beginning and a chance to start on a better footing. While enshrining the right of all citizens to ‘housing, health, food, water and social security’, by simultaneously ‘protecting property rights, the constitution ratifies the outcome of over three centuries of colonial and apartheid violence-conquest, dispossession, and the Land Acts of 1913 and 1936, as well as the successive labour regimes of slavery, forced labour, migrant labour and cheap rightless labour on the basis of which capital accumulation took place’ (von Holdt 2013, p. 593). My own place here now can be traced back to the extraction of gold and the exploitation of people made into migrant labourers. My maternal grandfather left his wine growing family in Croatia at the time of the phylloxera (a ‘plague’ of microscopic aphids affecting grape vines that destroyed the wine-making industry in many areas of Europe at the turn of the century). He worked a number of ‘small workings’ in Zimbabwe (then Southern Rhodesia), employing migrant labourers from Malawi and managing to send sums of money home. My paternal grandfather was recruited by the British government to build the railways used for, among other empire-related purposes, to move extracted wealth to sea ports. I am part of the swarm of the gold rush and colonial expansion. My university began its life as a mining college. If doing my homework entails ‘unlearning that which one has learned; unlearning privilege, especially the privilege of sanctioned ignorance that allows the perpetuation of silence about on-going colonial violence’ (Sundberg 2014, p. 39), then homework is an on-going project of becoming-with damaged colonial spaces. My body holds memories of both powerless child and authoritative pedagogue. I am a vulnerable woman in a violent society with one of the highest rape statistics in the world, as well as privileged employer of adult black workers (I employ two people who work part-time to maintain my house and garden). Everything bears the traces of an extractive history. Barad argues that ‘Memory – the pattern of sedimented enfoldings of iterative intra-activity—is written into the fabric of the world’ (Barad 2011, p. 146). When five-year-old Bokamuso recognised me as the owner of a car, and a camera, he astutely placed me in a particular position in an entanglement of becoming. He reminded me of my privileged position always and already implicated in the perpetuating inequalities of past and current relationalities. Staying with the trouble and doing one’s homework requires turning the compost of histories, stories and encounters, seeing what is just beneath the surface or right here in the middle. This is not a romanticisation of the past or a return to pre-industrial technologies. Disruptions of the present and waves of temporal diffraction, render me capable of seeing differently and invite me to remain open to all my possible ways of ‘being with’ and risking myself/selves. Practicing a living a/r/tographical enquiry I re-turn (to) Gosani’s image tree and tausa dancer diffracting with the public park space, body, tree, pass laws, and photography (Fig. 7.6). To diffract the Tausa and the tree, I use my own (white) body to disrupt the colonial pattern of using Blackness to

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Fig. 7.6 Thinking with park, body, tree, pass laws and photography: Tausa tree diffraction. Photo collaboration with Maurice Smithers and Mitra Maki

represent ‘race’, knowing, however, that the reverberations of colonial and apartheid legislation and practices continue to mark and divide, to abuse and privilege human and non-human bodies differently.

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. London: Durham University Press. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and Hauntological relations of inheritance: dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. https://doi.org/10.3366/drt.2010.0206. Barad, K. (2011). Nature’s queer performativity. Qui Parle, 19(2), 25–53. Barad, K. (2014). Diffracting diffraction: Cutting together-apart. Parallax, 20(3), 168–187. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623. Barad, K. (2017).Troubling times/s and ecologies of nothingness: Re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. New Formations, 92(93), 56–89. https://doi.org/10.3898/newf. Cagliari, P., et al. (Eds.). (2016). Loris Malaguzzi and the schools of Reggio Emilia: A selection of his writings and speeches, 1945–1993. New York: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2010). Deleuze and the meaning of life. London: Continuum. Derrida, J. (1994). Specters of marx: The state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. Edited by Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Dixon, K. (2010). Literacies, power, and the schooled body: LEARNING in time and space. London: Routledge.

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Gillespie, K. (2015). Tausa: the making of a prison photograph and its public. In T. Kurgan, & T. Murinik (eds) Wide Angle: Photography as Participatory Practice. Joannesburg: Fourth Wall. Available at: http://fourthwallbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Wide-Angle_Final.pdf. Gould, S. J., & Purcell, R. W. (2000). Crossing over: Where art and science meet. New York: Three Rivers Press. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest—Witness@ Second—Millennium. FemaleMan − Meets − OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Psychology Press. Hayashi, K. (2010). From Trinity to Trinity, trans. Eiko Otake (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 2010). von Holdt, K. (2013). South Africa: The transition to violent democracy. Review of African Political Economy. Taylor & Francis, 40(138), 589–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.854040. Knight, L. (2016). Playgrounds as sites of radical encounters: mapping material, affective, spatial, and pedagogical collisions. Pedagogical matters: New materialisms and curriculum studies (pp. 13–28). New York: Peter Lang. Lenz Taguchi, H. (2010). Going beyond the theory/practice divide in early childhood education: Introducing an intra-active pedagogy. London: Routledge. Malone, K. (2019). Walking-with children on blasted landscapes. Journal of Public Pedagogies, (4). https://doi.org/10.15209/jpp.1184. Murris, K., Reynolds, R.-A., & Peers, J. (2018). Reggio Emilia inspired philosophical teacher education in the Anthropocene: Posthuman child and the family (Tree). Journal of Childhood Studies, 43(1), 15–29. https://doi.org/10.18357/jcs.v43i1.18262. Nxumalo, F. (2016). Storying practices of witnessing: Refiguring quality in everyday pedagogical encounters. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 1(15), 1–15. Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. New York: Routledge. Plaatje, S. (1920). Native life in South Africa, before and since the European war and the boer rebellion (3rd ed.). Kimberley: Tsala ea batho. Sundberg, J. (2014). Decolonizing Posthumanist Geographies. Cultural Geographies, 21(1), 33–47. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474013486067. Taylor, A. (2011). Reconceptualizing the “nature” of childhood. Childhood, 18(4), 420–433. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0907568211404951. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L. et al. (eds.) (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet: Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota. Tuck, E., & Yang, K. W. (2014). Unbecoming claims: Pedagogies of refusal in qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 20(6), 811–818. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800414530265. Wood, D. (2006). On being haunted by the future. Research in Phenomenology, 36, 274–298. Wood, D. (2019). Introduction: Reinhabiting the Earth. In Reoccupy Earth: Notes Toward an Other Beginning. New York: Fordham University Press, pp. 1–26. https://doi.org/10.5422/fordham/978 0823283545.003.0001. Yates, R., Parkington, J., & Manhire, T. (1990). Pictures from the past: A history of the interpretation of rock paintings and engravings of Southern Africa. Pietermaritzburg: Centaur.

Chapter 8

The Art of Learning with Trees

Living in a time of planetary catastrophe thus begins with a practice at once humble and difficult: noticing the worlds around us. Tsing et al. (2017, p. M7).

Abstract What access do children have to public spaces and spaces to children? What are the relationships of mutual care and custodianship that flow in between and among the more-than-human intra-actions made possible by ‘commoning’? Trivial events and things, quiet whispered stories that may be overlooked in the purposeful business of everyday city living and dismissive notions of child, perform energetically in relation and as part of our intra-connected and changing worlds. They become more-than-visibly present in their tangible and somatic connection with an alert and haptically aware community of children and a camera-wielding maker/researcher.

8.1 Thinking with Time, Space and Matter The city of Johannesburg, and more particularly this inner-city suburb is important as the location of my research story. The fact that this suburb has attracted migrants and refugees for most of its life has made it what it is today and will create futures that are not likely for other places. Threads of connection enabled by this geographical place enable my becoming-researcher (Fig. 8.1). Friendships, political ideas, dependencies, commitments and habits tie me into patterns of living and being in this place and enable my learning and changing (becoming). A growing family of non-biological kin introduced me to new worlds. Even though I had been at boarding school in the seventies in Rhodesia with two French-speaking sisters from what was then known as Zaire, I had never been to the Congo. In fact, together with most countries in the region, it seemed further away to me than Europe.

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Fig. 8.1 The public park as thoroughfare

In early 2011, I led a ‘community of philosophical enquiry’ (following the P4C practice) with fellow activists at a gathering of non-governmental organisations in Lubumbashi in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). We used a photograph by a local Lubumbashi photographer, Georges Senga, as the starting point or provocation for our thinking together (Footprint Fig. 8.2). The photograph shows a disturbed piece of ground. Visible in the picture are a playing card, a bank note, a chicken feather, a leaf, ash and sand. The enquiry which emerged from the group revolved around ideas about what lay beneath this visible surface on which some fracas had obviously taken place. The issue of colonial pillage was the focus of the questions raised. Why were the people of the DRC so poor when right beneath their feet, there lay untold wealth? The export of coltan destined for more than half of the world’s cell phones and mined under horrendous conditions is part of this reality. Senga’s framing of a small seemingly arbitrary piece of ground seemed to me like a powerful methodology for thinking with the world. Could this methodology help me to think with my small place: the preschool near the park in the Johannesburg inner-city suburb? Could a framing of sections of this place help me to think with the ground, the earth, the surface, and what it hid? (Figs. 8.3 and 8.4). What spatial, temporal and material layerings could prompt me to some new ways of thinking and being with the world?

8.1 Thinking with Time, Space and Matter

Fig. 8.2 Footprint, by Georges Senga, 2009. Photograph courtesy of the artist

Fig. 8.3 Marks and traces left by the human and nonhuman participants in pedagogy

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Fig. 8.4 Grass, clover and ants. Busy ants carry a piece of mielie pap to their underground home

8.2 Fees Must Fall Four years on, as I continued to grapple with the considerable challenges offered by the early childhood education sector and its ‘Cinderella’ status, bigger children were claiming their space in the public arena. Students on university campuses around the country protested about fee increases and the exclusionary and Euro-Western nature of higher education. Mbembe (2015), when addressing students at the start of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ uprising, spoke of the need to renegotiate public space as a move to decolonise South African society. For him, as for many South Africans, the students were raising issues that had been left unaddressed for years since the ‘dawn of democracy’. For the early childhood education sector, it raised the alarm bells: how much more urgent was free universal early childhood education? The students’ call for decolonisation touched a nerve and ruffled a good many feathers. It also created portals to memories strangely dormant.

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In 1894, as Prime Minister of the Cape Colony,1 Cecil Rhodes introduced the notorious Glen Grey Act which effectively forced Africans into wage labour on the mines. As for their status as citizens, he announced that ‘the natives are in a sense, citizens, but not altogether citizens … they are still children….’.2 Conflating children and the colonised in this way is only possible in a world in which ‘man’, and ‘white man’ specifically, is recognised as the only truly ‘human’ subject. In their well-publicised protest against colonised education and the assumptions of privilege and whiteness, the Rhodes Must Fall movement were drawing attention to these humanist genealogies underlying the academy. The Rhodes Must Fall movement lit a spark of protest and anti-colonial mobilisation among students across the country that spread to their counterparts at Oxford University in England. Initial formations of diverse groupings expressed an intersectional analysis of dominant power structures calling for a commitment to a knowledge production and university management framed in new ways. Much of this debate continued in different forums and sparked new formations of civil society. Despite some fragmentations and party-political interference, it is recognised as something of a turning point in ideas about active citizenry and political agency (Chinguno et al. 2017). Entangled with the youth protests of 1976 and the more recent Fridays for Future movement, these ‘fallist’ activists send seismic shudders through the world’s youngest continent led by the world’s oldest leaders. Mbembe’s appeal to the students at the height of the protest was for an on-going decolonisation of public space: a move they had started with efforts towards the coproduction of a different kind of university. This framing of decolonisation includes but is not limited to Africanising curriculum content and hiring Black professors. To decolonise our public spaces we would need to change the patterns and habits of ownership and entitlement we have inherited. This would require a refusal of stereotypical and limiting ‘identity politics’ for us to become a more-than-human public, an active implicated and response-able part of our common multi-species emergent worlding worlds. To re-open the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to learn how to share it again amongst the humans, but also between the humans and the non-humans. (Mbembe 2015).

8.3 Park Space as Learning Space What could this mean for children in Johannesburg? What access do children have to public spaces and spaces to children? What are the relationships of mutual care and 1 The

British took control of the Cape from the Dutch East India Company in 1795. It was later to become the Cape Province, part of the ‘Union of South Africa’ formed in 1910 after the South African War. The Union brought together imperial and settler colonial interests, effectively excluding all local African leadership. In 1948, the National Party won the election and formally and legally entrenched racial segregation through the adoption of their policy of ‘Apartheid’. 2 Rhodes’s 1894 speech in parliament www.sahistory.org.za/people/cecil-john-rhodes.

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custodianship that flow in between and among the more-than-human intra-actions made possible by ‘commoning’3 ? These open-ended and multi-faceted questions diffract, refract and re-turn with me to the preschool and park. The preschool I worked with makes daily use of a public park. I knew that most preschools in the area did not share the ease of access to such a large, public, open, green space. The lessons from the city of Reggio Emilia are strong on the insistence that the environment is our teacher and that our own place and our community, if listened to, will guide us to the most appropriate and authentic style or system of early childhood education and care (Barclay and Browne 2019). The common public spaces of parks provide a crack through which energies can flow between inside and outside; private and public; school and home; work and play. The children point out things, ask questions and become much more physically animated while they are in the open space of the park: running, rolling, cartwheeling. They collect seeds and small objects that they take back to the classroom and sort and count and examine. Their close attention to and bodily connection with the ground draws my attention to the surface of the ground. I am reminded of Senga’s images and I photograph selections of ground surface. These images draw me in and my skin responds to the skin of the earth. What is on the surface suggests what is underneath. What is visible makes the invisible present—and what we can ‘see’ are entangled multiple temporalities (Fig. 8.3). This assemblage of puzzle piece, peg, hair elastic, clover, feathers, grass tell a story about sweeping, cleaning, sorting, losing, counting, caring, discarding. There are more things outside of the picture frame, things hidden beneath the surface of the earth, and things hidden by chronological time. Like a seashore, the back door of the crèche is a liminal boundary space where the inside and outside meet and converse and diffract through the sweepings of the preschool floor. The red earth visible here is the top layer of a complex geology. Johannesburg sits on a ridge formed by the impact of a meteorite that hit the earth over 2000 million years ago. This collision liquidised the rock and earth at the centre of the impact, broke up the earth’s crust and tipped the Witwatersrand basin, which had held an inland sea and considerably rich ore-containing conglomerates. The circular ridge that formed around the point of impact folded the goldbearing conglomerates deep into the earth’s surface—in some places kilometres deep. Geology tells us that this protected the gold for millennia from being washed away by erosion (Brodie 2008). The discovery and exploitation of this immense volume of gold followed the already established patterns of inequality and extractive accumulation operating in the worlds claimed by colonial empires. The carving up and sharing out of Africa by the European powers at the Berlin Treaty was part of this pervasive system. Prevailing national border boundaries that divide human clans and frustrate animal migrations remain in place. 3 In

their book, Free, fair and alive, Bollier and Helfrich challenge the objectivised concept of ‘The Commons’ proposing instead a relational and performative verb: commoning. Importantly, the notion refers to systems and relationships rather than resources or commodities (Bollier and Helfrich 2019).

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In post-Apartheid Johannesburg, the mining continues. The extensive and continuing damage to the land and ecologies includes acid mine water drainage, radioactivity, and soil and air pollution. Large multi-national mining companies gain concessions to mine and re-mine existing shafts and waste dumps. Some mines lie unattended, abandoned and unmanaged. There are an estimated 8000 derelict or ownerless mines in South Africa, with 600 of them in and around Johannesburg (Balch 2015). Their radioactive remains cause on-going harm to the living and the yet unborn. ‘Nature’ has a murderous agency. On the west rand, across the boundary of Main reef road that runs from east to west, and over the ridge from our urban park space, children with no access to a park play in sand that measures radiation equivalent to Chernobyl,4 and they swim in water that has acidity higher than vinegar. Residents complain that the dust from the waste dumps gets everywhere: in their food, in their water, in their lungs. Farmers, given access to this land by the municipality despair over the pain and suffering endured by their livestock, blind animals, still-born young. Sink holes are treacherous, and almost alive, swallowing up human and non-human prey. Mariette Liefferink’s Federation for a Sustainable Environment (FSE) produces an online magazine, ‘Mining News’. Reporting on sink holes, in September 2014, they recount a story from 1964 in which an entire home with six occupants disappeared without a trace.5 Dolomitic rock, on which large parts of Johannesburg sits, is in itself is prone to sinkhole formation, but in concert with the dewatering of mines (pumping of water from underground in order to access the gold), the chances increase. The US Environmental Protection Agency recognised as early as 1987 that ‘…problems related to mining waste may be rated as second only to global warming and stratospheric ozone depletion in terms of ecological risk. The release to the environment of mining waste can result in profound, generally irreversible destruction of ecosystems’ (Durand 2012, p. 30).

8.4 Scales of Entanglement The bulk of uranium produced in South Africa is a by-product of gold mining and the material has at different moments in history been considered more or less important. The Apartheid government had a strategic interest in nuclear arms and entered into a short-lived contract for uranium exports with the US government in 1952, and also embarked on its own nuclear armaments manufacture. By 1989, the Apartheid government was in possession of six nuclear bombs and a seventh one was under construction. In 1989, with the Cold War ended and in anticipation of an African majority government coming into power, they entered a nuclear non-proliferation treaty and destroyed the bombs. Uranium is still processed in a plant on the South 4 https://www.mining.com/radioactive-sludge-seeping-from-hundreds-of-johannesburg-mines-

compared-to-chernobyl/. succumbs to sci-fi sinkholes. Mining News, 28 September, 2014.

5 Johannesburg

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West of Johannesburg, some destined for use in the Koeberg nuclear power station in the Cape province which was built in 1984. The price of uranium dropped with increasing global production and by the end of the 1980 s most uranium brought to surface was dumped along with the general ‘waste’ and this practice prevails (although as prices are rising, this may change). Information about this commodity is obviously not always available nor reliable. Heavy metals like uranium, thorium, radium and radon have unstable nuclei. The minerals decay into different forms over time. Thorium, radium and radon are known as ‘daughter’ isotopes of uranium and all are the descendants of radioactive materials that are known to have been present at the very beginning of the formation of the earth. These unstable materials pose numerous health hazards for humans, animals, plants and microbes. Living organisms as well as their DNA (their unborn offspring) are at risk. Radioactive material is not the only dangerous waste being dumped by mines on the Witwatersrand. Lead, mercury and cobalt levels are way above acceptable levels in many of the mined areas of Gauteng. The underground water systems are also being polluted by mining activity. Gold bearing rock, when exposed to water, air, and bacteria, produces sulphuric acid: one of the offending ingredients in acid mine drainage (AMD). Other materials include iron, aluminium, manganese and arsenic. The once ‘pristine’ water of a system of aquafers that could meet the city’s drinking water needs are being poisoned and rendered unusable (Mutanga and Mujuru 2017, p. 34). Operational and abandoned shafts and tunnels create a vast network of open spaces that connect up with the underground lakes. The mine voids, which stretch from the west to the east of the city of Johannesburg, were dug out during mining activity carried out over a period of more than 120 years, and are estimated to have a volume of about 400 million cubic metres (now filled with acidic water) (Mutanga and Mujuru 2017, p. 34).

Ants and people burrow beneath the earth’s surface along with the roots of the grass, the weeds and the trees. Zama Zamas or informal miners, many of them undocumented migrants, work some of the abandoned mine shafts. Many are employed by other more powerful syndicates and are vulnerable to gang violence and theft. Many live underground for weeks, extracting small quantities of gold in extreme conditions of heat, dust, lack of air. This underneath of Johannesburg has played and continues to play its role in the on-going patterns of life and living in this damaged space.

8.5 Counting Costs This chapter began with an image from the DRC entangled with stories of extraction and colonial pillage. The concept, ‘conflict minerals’ was invented there. Uranium for the Manhattan project was sourced from Shinkolobwe mine, in Katanga Province (Williams 2016) and in the Cold War arms race, the USA couldn’t risk the valuable resource falling into the hands of a Soviet-supporting left-wing government. Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in a what is now believed to have been a Belgian/USA

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and possibly MI6 joint plot (Nzongola-Ntalaja 2011, 2002). This was in early 1961 shortly after Lumumba had won the first election in that country after 500 years of slavery and colonialism. Lumumba’s ghost haunts each particle of uranium as does an entire country of people waiting on a future never realised. The real costs of mining are finally being paid, but not by those who have benefitted. Issues of ethics and how to live are bound up in our being and being part of and experiencing/knowing our reality (the ‘doing’). Being connected and part of reality through our relationality gives us responsibility (being accountable and implicated) and response-ability (the ability to respond in relation). Murris and Bozalek (2019) show us how the thinking of Barad, drawing uniquely from quantum physics and feminist theory is not exclusive but entangled with other monist and relational ontologies including those of Spinoza and Deleuze and resonate with nonEuro-Western relational and animist indigenous and eastern cosmologies. Barad’s ethico-onto-epistemology re-configures the discoveries of Euro-Western science (quantum physics) with morality and ethics. They are cut together-apart, and they are inseparable. Feminist environmental and ecological humanities scholars Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing and Deborah Bird Rose also ponder the question at the heart of the Anthropocene: how to respond in the face of precarity, vulnerability, damage and loss. For Rose, the choice is always for life, and the celebration of the thriving continues despite the destruction. In response to the ‘Shimmer’ of life, we can choose to be drawn into connection and say, ‘yes!’ to life (Rose 2017). For Haraway, recognising the sympoietic becomings of the world ‘is just the beginning of ‘staying with the trouble”(Tsing et al. 2017, p. M5). Appreciating intra-active and constantly shifting relationships is a complex and precarious balance. Caring for the earth requires us to ‘listen beyond newspaper headlines to hear those quiet stories about the Anthropocene whispered in small encounters’ (Tsing et al. 2017, p. M9). Tsing asks ‘What if precarity, indeterminacy, and what we imagine as trivial are the centre of the systematicity we seek? Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves’ (Tsing 2015, p. 20). If we can disrupt the ‘driving beat’ of progress, we might notice the ‘little’ things and other ‘temporal patterns’ (Tsing 2015, p. 21). A ‘becoming-little’ emerges as a pedagogical hint in a sympoietic worlding-with children in the park. I return to and re-turn the encounter with the small tree (Fig. 1.1) and my becoming different in relation with the small swarm of attentive five-year-olds. On a subsequent visit to the park we discovered that the small tree that we love had been cut; mown down in the routine grass-cutting done by the parks management (Fig 8.5). There was disappointment and sadness. The children expressed their dismay and to my surprise, requested that a new series of photos be taken to record this alarming state of affairs. I was pulled by different habits and learnings as to how to respond as teacher/adult/knower. The obvious response would have been to explain that this

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Fig. 8.5 Small tree cut down

is how the park is managed. How the people who help us keep the park clean and prevent things from getting out of hand. We could ask: How can we just allow any sprout or new tree or unplanned growth to flourish or take over? Ideas about weeds creep in. Is a park about keeping ‘wildness’ out? The other pull was to choose to listen to the children. To listen to their words, their bodies, their actions, their drawing attention to and ‘staying with’ the broken tree, photographing it, posing with it. The ‘teacher’ impulse was to move away, make it invisible, draw attention away from it to other more pleasant things, to ‘fix’ it for the children somehow, or at least to explain or justify the event. The tangible grief expressed by the children was something I wanted to escape from. My own learning/unlearning was an intra-active becoming-with the documentation. These are not only emotions the children ‘have’ individually and subjectively, but are more significantly, a disruption of the close connection the children have with the little tree and their sense of care for the tree through its membership of the community of the park, the children, their drawings, the grass, the clover, the ants, the soil and my camera that recorded the shocking

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experience. They all have mutual distributed agency and are all active participants ‘in the world’s becoming’, materialising and unfolding in different temporalities (Barad 2007, p. 136). Grief for the little tree joins up with my grief for the wider wasteland that is Johannesburg. Response from an affective, empathetic and visceral knowing. The small tree is not a mere passive object of human knowledge, to be discovered by the children, talking and thinking about or experimenting on, classifying ‘it’ into an ordered taxonomy of plants with nameable parts and a predictable life cycle. The children are part of the world—a nature-cultures reality they are moving through and are one with, ontologically and ethically. As sensory participants in this world-ing they are viscerally affected by the violent removal of this small tree sapling. They embark on ‘the difficult cultural work of reflection and mourning’ (Haraway 2016, p. 39) as their celebration of life mutates into grieving. This park, while offering experiences of the organic and ecological (including creatures such as bees, ants, caterpillars and rats), is managed and controlled as part of a system of city parks with particular notions of order, control, beauty and functionality, foregrounding certain stories and erasing others. It is a microcosmic layer of a well-established but not uncontested mechanism of government and expects a certain kind of human response. The insistent colonial presence of the lawn has a long and vibrant history on the highveld (Cane 2019). This space is not a food garden, nor is it a muti6 garden; it is a recreational facility where the gymnastic equipment and running, rolling, somersault-inviting smoothness of an alien lawn variety coconstitute modern urban children-in-parks. A counter discourse diffracts with and through the dominant one: indigenous forms of clover creep in unannounced and unwelcome. Ants are too small to fence out and can go too deep for insecticide to reach. The perfection of the colonial park is constantly, consistently, always, already un-made. It is in the in-between of the ‘tidying’ of the park by the local authority and the unruly nature of weeds, sproutings, messiness and disorder that a different rhythm emerges. It is through the noticing by the children that the adult can un-learn the repeating of patterns of humanist, human-centred, ways of being with/in the park, and further ways of being with a ‘wilder’ pedagogy. An assemblage of ‘lifeways’ (Tsing 2015, p. 23) that connect children and trees makes visible new and more complex patterns of multi-species engagement that challenge accepted and progressive narratives that envisage schools and parks as enabling environments for ‘healthy’, ‘normal’, ‘appropriate development’, learning and ‘improvement’. A wilder, ‘bewildering’ encounter opens up possibilities for becoming different with non-human kin in the park. The Anthropocene has given permission for us to jettison any residual urges for civilising, humanising education (Snaza 2013). The children posed for pictures with the truncated sapling as well. They expressed disappointment and perhaps some (already) resignation—being accustomed to being excluded from decisions about ‘matters of concern’ in the school and the wider 6 ‘Muti’

is a widely used Southern African term for herbal medicine. A muti garden is one planted with medicinal herbs for use by a traditional healer.

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community (Blaise et al. 2017). Dominant discourses in early childhood education tend to romanticise the relationship between children and ‘nature’ drawing on ‘Eurowestern’ notions of childhood innocence and the dualism of ‘non-human nature’ and ‘human culture’ (Nxumalo and Cedillo 2017, p. 100). The romantic notion of the child ‘communing’ with the small tree sapling cohered with sedimented developmentalist narratives of purity, growth and innocence. But staying with the painful sight of the severed twig did not. ‘It matters what thoughts think thoughts; it matters what stories tell stories’ (Haraway 2016, p. 39). The children’s responses to the removal of the small tree made visible the exclusion of the children from the right to care for and make choices about their learning space. In Fig. 1.7 the artist has included an image of the person who sweeps the park. ‘People who help us’ is a theme covered in the life skills curriculum for Grade R, and here, the custodians of the park have been found wanting. The people who help us seem not to know us, nor do they ask just how we may want to be ‘helped’. The segregation of the classroom and the park excludes children from the life of the city. The park constructs them in particular ways. They are the child-playing or the childswing assemblage. They are part of the city and the community, but not regarded as fully citizens (yet). They are kept in the confines of schooling so that their presence in the materiality of the world is minimal. The park prevails although its shade and air sustain a new community. An incommensurability governs the troubled relationships between city parks and the park users. Modernist urban notions of how urban space should be used conflict with demands made by current realities and ‘stakeholders’. Informal taxi operators look for spaces and water sources for washing their taxis, homeless people look for places to sleep and spend their days. How are children expected to engage with parks? What kind of children are imagined in the design, creation and management of these spaces? Tsing inspires us to ‘see’ what tends to be regarded as ‘trivial’, but which matter profoundly when we are in touch with/in the world we are a part of and care for. Being closer to the earth’s surface, children are drawn to details that are trivial or unimportant to others. ‘Becoming-little’ as a methodology disrupts the adult/child binary that positions ‘little’, younger humans as inferior to their ‘bigger’ fully human counterparts. I exemplify ‘becoming-little’ through five-year-olds’ learning with the little tree and adopt Barad’s diffraction as a method to ‘see’ what is in/visible in the park: a system of care-less, business-as-usual, mechanical ‘cleaning’ that ignores the connected and ecologically aware responsiveness of children whose impulse is to choose life and celebration. Wider waves of diffraction and my own new responsiveness bring some unsettling knowledge about a secret kept by our city: toxic piles of poisonous waste and underground caverns invisible to most of us above the surface, and over the ridge in our once-white suburb. Following the concepts of ‘care’ and ‘custodianship’ led me to rhizomatic sproutings that led to new ways of considering ‘pedagogy’. Pedagogy and the school separate children from their worlds and their relationships: something that Loris Malaguzzi’s metaphor of ‘the hundred languages’ works to undermine (Rinaldi 2006, p. 121).

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The school and the culture separate the head from the body They tell the child to think without hands to do without head They tell the child to discover the world already there They tell the child that work and play reality and fantasy science and imagination sky and earth reason and dream are things that do not belong together. Excerpts from ‘The Hundred Languages’ poem by Loris Malaguzzi (translated by Lella Gandini)7

In a thinking-feeling-with the tree, the children share their sense of the tree’s entangled subjectivity and vulnerability. Not human, but living, and like them, managed in a controlled setting with human purposes/agendas of ‘progress’—like their school has. Their place in school and the tree’s place in the park. Always at risk of being swept aside in the more important grand scheme of progress and development.

8.6 Third Teacher, Third Nature Trivial events and things, quiet, whispered stories that may be overlooked in the purposeful business of everyday city living and dismissive notions of child perform energetically in relation and as part of our intra-connected and changing worlds. They become more-than-visibly present in their tangible and somatic connection with an alert and haptically aware community of children and a camera-wielding maker/researcher. Efforts at maintaining an established order in inherited colonial systems produce new realities and layers of emergent practices, performativities and precarious economies. For Tsing, this is ‘third nature’ (Tsing 2015, p. viii). We cannot return to a pure nature (the idea that a nature existed prior to ‘culture’ and human intervention), nor to a pre-colonial nature in which the trope of industry and progress holds no sway. Everything (climates, water, and food) is affected by ever expanding and overlapping ripples of anthropogenic impact. Third nature, then is ‘what manages to live despite capitalism’ (Tsing 2015, p. viii). In the messy and unintended ‘offstage’ realities of late capitalism new relations and emergent ecologies are becoming or can be noticed. Children meeting trees at the ‘unruly edges’ (Tsing 2015, p. 20) of a park management system draw attention to questions about care and response-ability. Pedagogical documentation and art-making can work as a diffraction (and a tool against distraction) among and with the human and more-than-human, the visible and the invisible, the present, the past and our possible futures. We can see differently. 7 The whole poem can be accessed at https://www.cdd.unm.edu/ecln/PSN/common/pdfs/the%20c hild%20is%20made%20of%20100.pdf.

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Sensing with more than the eye and the ‘I’ of the individual human and the social human. We see with and in our bodies, human and more-than-human… our skin, our sense of scale through a distributed ‘iii’ of a being and becoming-with (Murris 2016). The event can be read as a story about the exclusion experienced by the children from the active caring and owning of the park. Their already established sense of sympoietic connection and care for their space and place is clear. Public parks and their colonial histories construct children as passive ‘users’ of these spaces. With more engagement between park managers and early childhood sites, a far more collaborative co-production, could be generated as a way of both caring for public space but also for providing lively and enlivening outdoor learning spaces for our youngest citizens that draw on local indigenous knowledges of the importance of place and relation-with-place (Nxumalo 2019). Contrary to many of our adult notions of children as ‘yet to become citizens’, they were already more than ready to take a custodian role and open to learning that could impact directly on their environment. Questions about access to land and resources remain unanswered in South Africa today even though our constitution upholds the right of every citizen to socioeconomic provision. To consider children and their relation to a public park without paying attention to the wider entanglements that create this reality plays into dominant paradigms that leave these questions unasked. Dahlberg and Moss (2005) question the compensatory nature of many high-level early childhood interventions that seek to solve problems largely caused by poverty and inequality by leaving existing economic systems in tact but investing carefully directed funds into the first years of schooling to mitigate ‘social ills’ (Dahlberg and Moss 2005, pp. 41–42). If open public spaces are valuable learning spaces for children, as my research claims, children’s productive access to these spaces is an important political issue, and a reconsideration of the benefits of mining is long overdue (Rutledge 2018). What do we as adults, teachers, pedagogues, co-researchers, ‘learners-with’ have to offer the educational project? Environmental education enlivened by the arts and cognisant of precarity and vulnerability as the current condition of our more-thanhuman lives could be a hopeful and generative response. This would be both an ‘art as intensity’ and an environmental/ecological sciences enquiry. As Malone and Truong (2017) suggest we need to develop an environmental education that embraces a relational ontology and takes precarity rather than sustainability as its starting point. Environmental education as part of life skills needs to be reformulated as ‘life strategies’ in which the Anthropocene offers ways of opening up beyond critique into a creative space of opportunity for finding different ways to be and live and learn ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ our precarious common worlds (Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015; Malone 2017). This will mean acknowledging and honouring our pasts, listening to the land, noticing its rhythms of knowing, its histories and geographies, its sciences and its posthumanities. What does the Anthropocene ask of environmental education, and how can it work as part of ‘Lifeskills’ in the Foundation Phase? An artful noticing and a multilanguage, multi-modalities expression of human and more-than-human relationality

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is a start. It requires finding ‘art science activisms’ (Haraway 2017); and an Ecoartivism. Working alongside children in environmentally responsive ways in and with damaged colonial spaces can offer fresh insights into possible post-age postanthropocentric futures.

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Nxumalo, F. (2019). Decolonizing place in early childhood education. New York: Routledge. Nxumalo, F., & Cedillo, S. (2017). Decolonizing place in early childhood studies: Thinking with Indigenous onto-epistemologies and Black feminist geographies. Global Studies of Childhood, 7(2), 99–112. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043610617703831. Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2002). The congo from leopold to kabila: a people’s history. New York: Zed Books. Nzongola-Ntalaja, G. (2011). ‘Patrice Lumumba: The most important assassination of the 20th century’, The Guardian (UK). Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/pov erty-matters/2011/jan/17/patrice-lumumba-50th-anniversary-assassination. Rinaldi, C. (2006). In dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning, In Dialogue with Reggio Emilia: Listening, researching and learning. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10. 4324/9780203317730. Rose, D. B. (2017). Shimmer: When all you love is being trashed. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. G51–G64. Rutledge, C. (Action A. (2018) ‘Mining In South Africa—Whose Benefit and Whose Burden?’ Available at: https://www.osf.org.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/sar-5.3_online.pdf. Snaza, N. (2013). Bewildering education. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 10(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/15505170.2013.783889. Taylor, A., & Pacini-Ketchabaw, V. (2015). ‘Learning with children, ants, and worms in the Anthropocene: Towards a common world pedagogy of multispecies vulnerability’, Pedagogy. Culture and Society. Routledge, 23(4), 507–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2015.1039050. Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, A. L., et al. (2017). Introduction: Haunted landscapes of the Anthropocene. In University of Minnesota Press. In A. L. Tsing, et al. (Eds.), Arts of living on a damaged planet (pp. M1–M12). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Williams, S. (2016). ‘The link between uranium from the Congo and Hiroshima: a story of twin tragedies’, The Conversation, August. Available at: http://theconversation.com/the-link-betweenuranium-from-the-congo-and-hiroshima-a-story-of-twin-tragedies-64329.

Chapter 9

Public Places as Learning Spaces

the child who became a man treks through all of Africa the child who became a giant travels through the whole world without a pass Excerpt from ‘The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga’ Ingrid Jonker, 1960. To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to learn how to share it again amongst the humans, but also between the humans and the non-humans. Mbembe (2015).

Abstract Finding new kin and collaborative ways to care about a corner of Joburg offers some hope on this shaky ground of pedagogical practice. Issues considered only marginally important by powerful hierarchies have the potential to create new connections and link up with and gain momentum from unexpected and unusual formations. The reverberations of historical events continue to pervade the Johannesburg landscape but there are hopeful signs of possibility that call from less obvious places. Children conduct research into the meaning of streets and follow the trail of waste as it leaves their dustbin; a bicycle is kitted out with art and gym equipment and moves between early childhood education sites. This is a tracking of the ‘shimmer’ of life found and followed by a crowd of co-researching companions in the desolate post-apartheid ruins that on the surface may appear only as the on-going denial of creativity and abundance.

The ghostly and enormous presence of Jonker’s mutated child moves across the entire world ‘without a pass’. Children did not carry pass books under Apartheid, but to become an adult in that world would mean to fall under the rubric of the dividing, classifying, mechanising force of the state. The implicit and invisible controls exerted on all children as ‘lesser mortals’ on the one hand and the contemporary exclusions of Africans exerted by international passport controls are lifted in Jonker’s apocryphal vision of a transformed Black (migrant) childhood. Dedicated to a child shot by The whole poem can be accessed at https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/child-who-was-shot-deadsoldiers-nyanga-ingrid-jonker. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2021 T. M. Giorza, Learning with Damaged Colonial Places, Children: Global Posthumanist Perspectives and Materialist Theories, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1421-7_9

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police in 1960 at Nyanga, Cape Town, her poem was read by President Nelson Mandela at the opening of the first democratic parliament on 24 May, 1994. It was a moment at which one kind of time stopped. If Sol Plaatje had been alive to witness the experience, how would he have described the waking moments of ‘new’ South Africans’? In 1994, a western-style democracy was instituted and the dismantling of all the layers of divisive legislation and spatial restrictions began. South Africa formally re-joined many international organisations it had either left or been excluded from, but almost thirty years later the deepest sedimentations of colonial heritage have not shifted. Access to the basics of life such as clean water, a reliable source of energy, and an adequate income still evade the majority of black South Africans. Education provision is so unequal as to further entrench the imbalances and divisions of the past. Competition for resources and jobs in crowded inner-city areas flares up at its worst moments into xenophobia, the flames often fanned by poor and partisan policing. The summoning of Jonker’s giant black child appears now as a provocation. The poem remains a powerful haunting of the possibilities of freedom always still to come.

9.1 Ways to Shine The curriculum and pedagogies driving the pursuit of life skills learning in South African preschools, when accompanied by a slowing down and a careful noticing, encounter the hauntings of historical pasts, a troubling of the workings of scale and the opening of possibilities for so many different ways of being and becoming together. The ingenuity, creativity and delight that flow generously through intraactive assemblages of children, preschools, parks, and the myriad unexpected companions that might appear on a daily basis are the main protagonists in this story. (Darker, more tragic realities are no less present, and must be noticed.) Researching-with and learning-with the children of Siyakhula, their teachers and their temporal/spatial/material worlds rendered things sufficiently out of focus to allow out-of-range, off the radar issues to assert themselves in the never single story of pedagogy and practice. The pedagogical stories narrated in the chapters of this book, while celebrating the responsiveness and congenial collaboration between a group of children and their learning spaces in the city, also acknowledge that these opportunities do not exist for most urban children. Long days spent indoors, with perhaps a turn taken on a swing in a small concrete, paved or astro-turfed yard space constitute the typical life of an urban preschooler. Even in the effective preschool/park collusion that is Siyakhula, children have a clearly defined and limited role to play: one that they sometimes seem far too ‘woke’ to be satisfied with. This small and insignificant corner of an inner-city suburb in present day Johannesburg asks some big questions. Can children have some say in decisions about the places they play and learn in? Is the park (partly) ‘their’ park? What would sharing ‘ownership’ of the park mean for children?

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Children ‘owning’ parks is an absurd idea if one uses a modernist, individualist concept of ownership. But there may be ‘other ways of having’ (Bollier and Helfrich 2019, p. 88). These other ways of having are an opportunity to de-centre the human in relations of being-with, rather than ‘having’. The notion of ‘the Commons’, for example, has parallels in many pre-industrial cultures and is an important one for opponents of global forms of capital. Cavanagh and Mander (2004, p. 107) note that ‘(a)s recently as two decades ago, large parts of the world were not part of economic globalisation. The majority of people in the world still lived off the land with little dependence on outside markets’. Aggressive and far-reaching changes to USA and global economic policies that have taken place since the 1970s have had and continue to have extensive and irreversible impacts on communities and the environment. Resources that were historically commonly owned, such as water, are increasingly being commodified and made inaccessible to the poor (Cavanagh and Mander 2004, pp. 109–113). Within current World Trade Organisation rules, genetically modified crops and other biological life forms can be patented and owned. On the other side of the political spectrum, environmentalists and indigenous people are fighting for the resources themselves to be recognised as legal entities. The ‘Rights of Nature’ movement has its origins in Ecuador, where Pachamama, or mother earth was granted rights in 2008, protected by the national constitution. Bolivia followed suit a year later. A river in New Zealand, the Whanganui, won a case against the Crown and now has legal rights and interests, and two legal human guardians (Roy 2017). Roelvink & Gibson-Graham (2009) ask us to re-think the notion of the commons to incorporate non-human members of the broader community. A flattened hierarchy of being would take notice of the entangled multi-relational realities of landscapes. Rather than demanding that historically excluded constituencies (like children, women, colonised or indigenous ‘others’) be incorporated into the ‘superior’ category of human or human, critical posthumanism asks that we reconsider the value of the category itself. Who is this Human or ‘Anthropos’ who has been the author of these exclusions? A long and stubborn history of Euro-Western thought going back to Greek Philosopher Aristotle put slaves, women and children into a grouping of lesser beings incapable of full rationality and virtue. The humanist campaign for universal human rights sought to put this right while not recognising the deeper and more profound impacts of human-centred dualistic thought. Individualism, property rights, colonial expansion and dispossession are all part of the same machine. The ‘machine’ of universalist ethics assumes that there are principles that apply equally across contexts. The ‘objective’ measurement of development, progress and universal suffrage are used as powerful judgements in an increasingly homogenised global reality with northern/European/western ontologies as its foundation. Participation was recognised as a key component of children’s rights in the formulation of the 1989 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United Nations project ‘Child-Friendly Cities’, started in 2002, includes the right of children to participate as a key indicator in their monitoring and evaluation processes. Urban planning practitioners and researchers from a range of disciplines in diverse regions of the world have with varying levels of success contributed to the growing movement in global development supporting the rights of children, to impact on the

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decisions that affect their lives and in the design and care of the spaces they live in (Malone 2015, 2018). Mannion (2007, 2012) makes the point that meaningful participation by children depends on solutions in which collaborative relationships between children, adults and particular city spaces are the focus. This ‘intergenerational and place-responsive’ critique contributes to the re-examination of the notion of ‘child-centredness’ and foregrounds the importance of relationality and the close connection between humans and their spaces. Public space is an important contributor to collaborative thinking. The Greek Agora or marketplace worked for the ancient Greeks and their form of democracy, and in a posthumanist sense can be seen to have co-constituted the Greek citizen. Civil society protest around the world, notably, Tiananmen Square, Beijing in 1989; Taksim Square, Istanbul, in 2013; the Occupy movement in the US in 2011; the #MeToo Movement; Fees Must Fall in South Africa in 2015, and the Fridays for Future movement have powerfully reignited the concept in recent years. In addition to the streets and public spaces of protest, traditional print and electronic media— and increasingly the various forms of social media—are for us today some of the most powerful spaces for public engagement and forces in the co-production of a connected global pluriverse. It is in the material-discursive realms of common space that the ‘public’ and excluded and ‘othered’ groups, like the homeless and, I would propose, children—can make themselves seen, heard and noticed as part of the public, or become a public (Mitchell 1995; Gillespie 2015). For children to come out into the open as visible and legitimate co-habitants of the city along with their energetic non-human companions (recognising the importance of co-constituting plant, insect and animal ecologies) they need allies who will not use them and their words for ulterior political motives (like scoring points and gaining votes). The City of Reggio Emilia and the organisation of Reggio Children have the visibility of children in the city as a central focus for their work in early childhood education. Their permanent exhibition: ‘One city many children’ tells the story of their many pedagogical projects over the years. In addition to serving as a means of on-going reflection and planning, their rigorous and versatile practice of documentation has an advocacy role in that preschools are considered public spaces (and part of the commons) where the parents, families and the broader community of the city can get to appreciate and share in the culture and worlding of children. A primary function of municipal planners in South African cities is to determine and apply zoning policies. Early childhood centres thus may apply for and be granted approval to operate on residential, business, church or government-owned land. Apart from monitoring land use, these planners also direct the applicants to relevant departments that manage roads, water, electricity, building plans and environmental health. Turning my attention to the issue of the park as a learning space and as a place that children have a claim to as ‘users’, I learned that it is the Department of City Parks and Zoo in the municipality that is the formal institution with direct responsibility for managing this space. Urban geographer, Claire Bénit-Gbaffou (2018) has explored

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the complexities and constraints involved in co-managing public space in Johannesburg and provides insights for potential engagements by early childhood activists with city structures on the issue of access for children and preschools to common space in the city and more radically, the ‘co-production’ of these spaces. Land designated as public open space is managed by a team of park managers. A park manager is given the task of overseeing the care of between 20 and 120 different urban spaces which may be a mix of ‘developed parks, undeveloped parks, conservancies and nature reserves’ (Bénit-Gbaffou 2018, p. 11). Each one manages a team of between 15 and 30 horticulture workers who move from site to site cleaning, mowing and maintaining the spaces. Bénit-Gbaffou’s on-going research advocates the reconfiguration of city management relationships to improve the possibilities for effective ‘co-production’ of public spaces through meaningful partnerships between local government and community groupings (Bénit-Gbaffou 2018). The objective is for smaller minor politics to seep into the discourse and allow a way of common worlding to emerge. One could say that public parks are a surviving relic of a social system that valued the notion of ‘the commons’: property held in communal ownership and responsibility. Could children, as a fluid and fluctuating constituency, be recognised as part of the lively companionship that may be possible in a communal use and intergenerational custodianship of public spaces? To conceive this kind of public space there needs to be an exploration of different kinds of ownership: those that are not reserved only for individual adult humans. Further, notions of ‘public’ and ‘private’ can set up a dualism between state and non-state or between personal and political. These binaries allow for convenient shifting of responsibility and fixes the rules of engagement effectively stifling the building of kinship and responseability. Posthumanist, feminist-inspired ‘ethics of care’ cut across the binaries and demand that we pay attention to the relational challenges of each situation. Planners may be more effective partners in the fight for better early childhood services if they considered the interface between individual childcare applications and nearby shared public spaces. Bollier and Helfrich (2019) see relationality as key to the concept of the ‘commons’. They point out that the ‘commons’ in themselves do not create responseable and mutual collaboration. The commons are brought about through an intraactive phenomenon of mutual relationships. The dismissive notion of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ invented by Garrett Hardin in 1968 is based on an imagined scenario in which common access to a resource by unrelated, disconnected and self-serving individuals is exploited and ruined. Bollier and Helfrich prefer to consider the active verb, ‘commoning’, to stress the importance of the relationships and systems that can be built to enact a ‘commons’ through what they call ‘peer governance’ (Bollier and Helfrich 2019, p. 146). In our context, public parks present opportunities for community-led governance of valuable resources, particularly for poorer communities who do not have access to their own private outdoor spaces, and who cannot afford holidays and trips to recreation sites elsewhere in and outside the city.

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9.2 Major and Minor Politics On a macro scale, democracy in South Africa has changed the city in important ways. Pass laws (that governed the movement of Black South Africans) and other race-based legislation are gone and elected officials represent the populace through periodic election processes. However, the limits of these changes are clear in the on-going divisions and persistent patterns of wealth and poverty that play out across our maps. In Johannesburg, clean new cityscapes are being created to the north while degraded mining areas and a decaying inner city are left for dead. Most of the city’s children contend with dodgy, dangerous or otherwise inadequate play space, an urgent issue of educational access not yet receiving appropriate attention. Going beyond the discourse of human and children’s rights, Malone et al. (2017) recognise that much of the work on ‘development’ and sustainability still assumes a forward move towards progress and development and as such seeks to ameliorate social injustices while leaving the larger problematic systems and relationships in place. The relatively recent but fast absorption of the ‘green economy’ and ‘green growth’ discourses into mainstream international economic planning is founded on claims that environmental harm can be reduced through technical means while current economic systems based on growth and exploitation can continue. A more appropriate and equitable framing of sustainability would have at its centre an acknowledgement of current conditions of precarity and the possibilities for new kinds of relationships among and between human and other-than-human parts of nature. The concepts of ‘minor’ or ‘minority’ politics, proposed by Deleuze and Guattari are powerful ideas with which to consider the alternatives to a universalist ethics and a deliberative democracy which is dependent on rational consensus. ‘Minor’ politics entail less hierarchical flows of power. In small local areas, changes to on-the-ground, everyday arrangements can shift worlds. Decisions, consensus, alliances and choices are always temporary and open to re-negotiation, and possibly conflict, but depend on reciprocal relationships and ethical response-ability. To stress this point in relation to children and childhood, the call for more intergenerational human relationality does ‘humanise’ child within existing social (human) relations, but ‘universalist’, anthropocentric social justice frameworks like ‘Child Rights’ leave unchallenged the prevailing patterns of environmental exploitation and fail to consider wider circles of entanglement. Duhn, Malone et al. (2017); Taylor (2017); Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw (2017) and a collective swarm of other early childhood researchers contributing to the Journal of Environmental Education Research have turned their attention to the problematic of the ‘Anthropocene’ to complexify the relation between child and nature, child and place, and the theorypractice of environmental education. Their work makes clear that it is a mistake to see urbanisation as a destruction of ‘nature’ that denies children their connection with a pure and innocent idyll, but that children (and humans more generally) are nature, and they are still nature in and with their urban realities if we can only appreciate the weedy, wild and precarious nature of nature, not to mention its ghostly reverberations. The inclusion and respectful engagement with and between human and

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non-human participants and ‘non-natal kin’ (Haraway 2016, p. 130) is productive of transformational ethical encounters, particularly in the shadow of the sixth mass extinction. There may be benefits for a city to be accredited by the United Nations as a ‘Child-friendly City’, but it seems that more local, ‘minor’ initiatives that focus on building human and more-than-human relationships and creating locally appropriate sustainable systems may have a deeper impact on changing patterns of inequality and exclusion. City planning, management of public spaces and community involvement in decision-making could work together to create and increase opportunities for play and learning for children in urban spaces but government-led, top-down designs based on humanist ethics may fail to respond adequately to the specific conditions and unexpected situations that emerge in particular local places. On a pragmatic note, however, ignoring the power balances and working only outside and in-between official channels is a naïve approach that could see local initiatives side-lined and or undermined by officials. Official channels are also part of the nature we are. These are the challenges that face the artivists and pedagogues at the interface between the major and minor politics of childhood. In South Africa, the dire conditions of poverty and inequality tend to produce the default positions of ‘basic needs’ and ‘bottom lines’ rhetoric. While the imperative to access basic needs is not refuted, the framing of children (and their carers) as passive receivers of care, nurture and services perpetuates a debilitating culture. The non-government BRIDGE ECD consortium tasked a team of researchers from within their membership to devise an ECD practitioner quality reflection tool1 to be used in an open-ended participatory way in an effort to move beyond fixed, top-down, readymade standards that are often inappropriate in real contexts. Early childhood care and education practitioners are ready to be included as active contributing agentic and related collaborators in their lives and communities. The notion of ‘quality’ in the early childhood development discourse is variable and contested but the need for access to outdoor play space does not appear to be in dispute. To its credit, the National Integrated ECD Policy (Department of Social Development 2015, p. 27) refers to the need ‘to allocate adequate resources for the realisation of play, recreation and cultural facilities for young children in town-planning processes’. Although national policy supports the use of public spaces for playgroups, recreation and cultural activities, we cannot assume that children already enrolled in ‘centre-based’ programmes in urban areas actually have adequate access to such facilities. Pressures on space for housing the growing numbers of city-dwellers have stretched the capacity of certain areas of the city. The populations of townships, inner-city spaces and informal settlements continue to expand, the latter evading any formal processes or conventions of planning, mostly having very little open space for recreation or even ‘breathing space’ between and around individual homes. Currently, Ilifa Labantwana, Smartstart and the Lima Rural Development Foundation are collaborating with government to train Community Development Workers (paid by the Dept of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs as part of the

1 https://www.saide.org.za/documents/ECD-Practitioner-Quality-Reflection-Tool-1.pdf.

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Extended Public Works programme EPWP) as ‘Smartstarters’ or playgroup facilitators in non-centre-based programmes that make use of community spaces for their activities. A collaboration between this kind of programme and city planners could help to increase access for children to outdoor play spaces, build organisation among ECD forums (existing networks of practitioners), build collaboration between local government and private and not-for-profit childcare and education providers, and link learning through play with environmental education.

9.3 Inner-City Artivism Already accustomed to inhabiting the overlapping space of art and early childhood, I seem to be straying into a different terrain altogether. Straddling the axle of my fast-moving pushchair, I have one foot in education and the other tentative one in issues of spatial planning. I am crossing a bumpy landscape that I haven’t been in before. Thinking-with-the-park has been a foray into new territory where I need to risk my safer self. Finding new kin and collaborative ways to care about our corner of Joburg offers some hope on this shaky ground of pedagogical practice. Issues most likely considered only marginally important by powerful hierarchies have the potential to create new connections and link up with and gain momentum from unexpected and unusual formations. In a Deleuzian ‘minor politics’, these local, contingent connections can create lines of flight with sufficient energy to redirect and reconstitute relations and patterns of engagement. The diffraction of Anna Tsing’s trivial and precarious ‘edges’ and anomalies of the global capitalist world and Bollier and Helfrich’s emergent ‘peer governance’ produce patterns of difference. In these small, edgy spaces we are more likely to confront the parallel threads of ethics and politics and forge new ways of living together. The City of Johannesburg has a lively and innovative public art programme effected through their Johannesburg Development Agency (JDA). The JDA’s threeyear partnership with art activist organisation, the Trinity Session2 has generated the creative programme, ‘#ArtMyJozi’, which describes its work as ‘creative placemaking through processes of community participation and co-production’. They have already impacted on the physical spaces of the city inviting public participation and story-ing to enliven the upgraded public transport networks being established across the city. The Open Streets event held in Auckland Park/Brixton in April, 2019 was initiated by teachers at Mimosa, a local school, in collaboration with the City of Joburg (Region B) and #ArtMyJozi. The pedagogical leaders of Mimosa school are part of the Africa Reggio Emilia Alliance AREA (Browne 2018; Barclay and Browne 2019) and contribute to its on-going work with Gauteng practitioners and partnership with the provincial education department. In preparation for the Open Streets 2 A collaborative art production team led by founders, Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs founded

in 2001.

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day, the Mimosa children and teachers embarked on a research project into streets in general and their own street in particular. They interviewed neighbours and passersby. They met and interviewed waste collectors and recyclers (part of an organised movement of self-employed ‘reclaimers’). They followed their own thoughts about what was going on beneath the soil and under their feet, down the drains and through the cracks. ArtMyJozi worked with the children to explore, through art-making, the meaning of streets and to enact different ways of being street users (Browne et al. 2019). Their work formed part of the public display on the day of the Open Streets event (Figs. 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4). Currently, our public urban spaces (and their colonial histories) assume certain well-established patterns of life, living and learning and construct children as passive ‘users’ of these spaces. But there are ways to disrupt these patterns and follow

Fig. 9.1 #ArtMyBrixton exhibition at the Region B Open Streets, 2019 showing project work done in local schools. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentatary Crew

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Fig. 9.2 Installation of children’s proposed street furniture as part of Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew

energetic lines of flight that ‘leap over the wall’ (Barclay and Browne 2019, p. 9). Going against the grain of the usual once-off city-led events, this particular Open Streets activation was more slowly steeped. There was a more gradual seeding among the children, their teachers, the neighbours and the various city officials who attended weekly meetings in the lead-up to the day. Co-productive activations like the Open Streets events and the participatory place-makings of ArtMyJozi begin to materialise Mbembe’s assertion that decolonisation has to do with taking back public space (Mbembe 2015). Events like these suggest that a closer engagement between city officials and ECD centres, with the help of creative post-age practices of philosophical play and art-based methodologies, could generate a far more collaborative co-production as a way to explore new forms of what Duhn, Malone and Tesar call ‘children/urban /nature assemblages’ (Duhn et al. 2017). The lifeworlds of participants need to find cracks through which to leak and flow so that local indigenous knowledges of the importance of place and relation-with-place can emerge.

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Fig. 9.3 Alternative traffic light design created by participants children’s workshops for #ArtMyBrixton exhibition and activation station at the Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew

9.4 A Tale of Two Entangled Cities The ‘Development Studies’ discourse of North and South, rich and poor, developed and under-developed, simplifies a complex and interconnected relationship between entangled partners and physical realities. These binaries of difference seem to suggest that the cities of Reggio Emilia and Johannesburg may have nothing in common and little to share. What could a preschool system in a wealthy North Italian city possibly have in common with a preschool in a precarious inner-city suburb in a post-Apartheid South African city? In fact, space and time perform in dynamic ways. Reggio Emilia and its preschool system play an important role in the unfolding story of Joburg and its children. They work in interconnected modes both actual and virtual: the historical and political; the philosophical and the pedagogical. To pay attention to these connections and what they do is to remain open to local possibilities for change and difference and to co-produce a phenomenon of ethically response-able pedagogies. The Reggio Emilia preschool system and its pedagogy are connected or entangled with Johannesburg childhoods in four complex knots of connection. Reggio Emilia’s contribution to early childhood education plays a critical role in my study first because

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Fig. 9.4 #ArtMyBrixton exhibition and activation station at the Region B Open Streets, 2019. Photograph courtesy of The ArtMyJozi Documentary Crew

it offers an alternative to the modernist and developmentalist approaches to early childhood education that are a default response in the sector. The pedagogues of Reggio Emilia work with an image of ‘child’ that is one of ‘co-constructor of knowledge, identity and culture’ (Dahlberg et al. 2013, p. 51). Importantly, ‘child’ is not associated with ‘nature’ but already connected with and among material-discursive assemblages of, for example, family, friends, school, language, city. Secondly, the African National Congress (ANC), the political movement that led the opposition to Apartheid, and that currently runs the municipalities of Gauteng Province (including the City of Joburg) developed close ties with the municipality of this Italian city in the decades before democracy. The City of Reggio Emilia signed a collaborative agreement with the ANC in exile in 1979 and maintains a post-apartheid relationship of ‘solidarity’ with the government of South Africa. The friendship between key individuals like the ANC’s leader-in-exile, Oliver Tambo, and Reggio Emilia’s Giuseppe Soncini added a human-relational and intimate connection, but it is the force of anti-authoritarianism and defiant egalitarianism that reverberates through time to connect the two places politically. The Joburg-based Africa Reggio Emilia Alliance continues and extends this intra-human connection. Thirdly, an art-centred practice of teaching and learning is foundational to the practice of the Reggio Emilia preschool pedagogy and central to the stories I have told so far. And fourthly, the two cities (in particular the municipal ward where Siyakhula preschool is located)

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are home to a considerable community of immigrant families. The city of Reggio Emilia has a much higher percentage of immigrants than the national Italian average of 9%. Sixteen percent of the population of Reggio Emilia are immigrants from Albania, Ghana, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and other African states, China and more recently Eastern Europe. These realities work together to create an intensified node of possibility for seeing and learning differently and in relation for both cities. The community of schools that became the Instituzzione Preschools and InfantToddler Centres of the Municipality of Reggio Emilia was initiated at the end of the Second World War. A number of citizens of Reggio Emilia, a strongly Communist region, were partisans, and directly involved in combat towards the end of the war. The first school at the village of Cella had been built by worker-parents from the rubble of destroyed buildings. Money was raised through the sale of a captured German armoured tank, trucks and horses (Gandini 2012). The municipal preschool system was founded through collaborative efforts led by Loris Malaguzzi and a group of parents, to provide quality childcare for the children of working people and grew into a model of early childhood education that is creative, democratic (in a relational sense), inclusive and appropriate to local conditions and history, in particular offering an alternative to fascism. The question arises in this writing about how existing, inherited resources in South Africa are being repurposed for the production of new worlds. Open streets and ‘place-making’ projects in the city are hopeful signs. How do patterns of engagement in our shared spaces, especially education spaces, make decolonisation possible? These are questions and ideas about ownership, belonging and care that emerge from the pedagogical narratives from Siyakhula. The Emilio Romagna region in Italy, of which Reggio Emilia is a main city, is considered to be one of the top economic regions of Europe even though the rate of growth has slowed down over the last few years. Italy, like most European countries, is experiencing a serious recession and is affected by the shifting fortunes of its comembers of the European Union. However, the municipality of Reggio Emilia, with its legacy of Communist left-wing politics, sees the investment in early childhood as an investment into the ‘commons’. At the annual Africa Reggio Emilia Alliance conference in 2013, Maddelena Tedeschi reported that in that year her city was spending 29% of its entire annual budget on early childhood education. In a way both similar and different, Johannesburg is the economic powerhouse of the province of Gauteng which generates about 35% of the country’s GDP. What’s more, the province’s economy exceeds many of the national economies on the African continent. Of all the provinces of South Africa, Gauteng attracts a greater number of migrants than any other despite being the smallest geographically (Gauteng Provincial Treasury Department 2016). This suggests that there are indeed commonalities shared by these two very different cities (Johannesburg and Reggio Emilia). The reverberations of historical events continue to pervade the Johannesburg landscape, but we are committed to following the hopeful signs of possibility that call from less obvious places. My research in a sense was a tracking of the ‘shimmer’ of life

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found and followed by my co-researching companions in the desolate post-Apartheid ruins that on the surface may appear only as the on-going denial of creativity and abundance. Multi-sensory aesthetic and ethical response-ability on the part of my fellow participants produced an emergent and artful environmental education whose goal is the forging of careful relationships between human and more-than-human companions in the business of learning to live (and die) well together in our wobbly city on our troubled earth.

9.5 Becoming a Place-Based Public Pragmatic recommendations guiding the adoption of the National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy (Department of Social Development 2015) do suggest an adventurous and experimental approach to providing opportunities for play and specifically outdoor play for children not attending centre-based programmes (Atmore et al. 2012). The policy acknowledges the need for commitment from city planning bodies to enable its successful implementation (Department of Social Development 2015, p. 27). This acknowledgement of the connection between education and spatial planning opens up new possibilities and it will be important for these potentially inclusive strategies to recognise that centre-based programmes and children, particularly in the inner city, could be valuable (expert) collaborators in these planning interventions. The responsibility for Early Childhood Education in South Africa is shared by the Departments of Social Development, Health and Education, the core management role only recently having shifted from Social Development to Education. The newly adopted curriculum for children from birth to four acknowledges that children’s learning—not only their nutrition and health—is important, but it offers minimal content and no methodology aimed at ethical, social or environmental values formation. The educational outcomes are individual and humanist and have not moved beyond the dominant developmentalist and ‘child-centred’ paradigm. It is no wonder that a key research study emerged with the finding that ‘play-based learning’, does not necessarily support fairness and inclusion (Aubrey 2017). Hoping to practice an ethnographer’s ‘immersion’ and not pre-empt what might emerge in the field, I nevertheless had a main focus for my research endeavour. That was to focus intently on the pedagogical performances of children and their spaces. The less visible entanglements of organisational relationships and responseability, although central to the workings of the centre, were not ‘centre-stage’. I was performing my artist/researcher/teacher role. Where were the activist molecules? Only towards the end of my research journey did I recognise the connection between two seemingly unrelated narratives in which I was implicated. The continuing crises in management and the multiple financial irregularities plaguing the centre as mentioned in Chapter Two, were part of the same entangled colonial construction of disinheritance, inequality and exclusion as assigning to children only passive and receptive roles in their school and community. The double twist of misogyny and

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misopedy creates the conditions for a dysfunctional early childhood sector. Children and black working-class adults, especially women, can—due to the diffractions of history, colonial and apartheid notions of difference, as well as patterns of wealth distribution—be accorded outsider status, and usually are. In the milieu of the daycare centre, it was clear that the teachers and the children were being alienated in different ways from decisions that affected their lives. Women who work in early childhood settings experience financial, social and political realities that exclude them from decision-making and undermine and distort their efforts to ‘take care’ of themselves, their children and their environments. This precarity of work and life among early childhood practitioners needs to be noticed and addressed if we are to be ready to begin the work of restoring some balance in our world.

9.6 Post-apartheid Democracy In a relational ontology, the concept of democracy is a fluid and shifting force that does different things in different relational phenomena. We can take an agential cut and track the connections, agencies and ‘marks on bodies’. Agential realism troubles democracy as a fixed principle that has pre-defined effects and characteristics (good is good for whom, what, when and where?). Some uncomfortable truths about our own emerging democratic order have been made visible through the concept of ‘violent democracy’. This seemingly contradictory concept is one that von Holdt (2013) and others have used to describe the conflicts waged over access to state resources by competing elites in modern constitutional democracies like our own. Party factions, the settling of old scores, patronage, assassinations, plots, faking of evidence all conspire and compete in the plundering of assets. A posthumanist relational ethics enables a recognition of intra-active realities, avoiding hasty judgements about ‘immorality’, but without condoning or justifying criminality. My initial judgements about corruption and misuse of public resources were, in the larger scheme of things, a privileged stance. At the time, I and the rest of the management team felt betrayed. Most importantly, we felt we needed to ensure that in each of the cases, the children, as the main beneficiaries of the project, were not negatively affected. Resolving disputes and reaching amicable agreements and restitutions entailed necessary but difficult negotiations. We had to find ways to carry on as members of the same community. A posthumanist ethics allows me now to see the intra-active phenomena that co-constitute lack and entitlement and co-produce the failure of our management and support structures. Early childhood practitioners, particularly in informal contexts, work long hours in a profession that demands high levels of patience, discernment and accountability. ECD practitioners are amongst the worst paid workers in the country, but often put in the longest hours. A practitioner earns an average of around R5000 per month.3 A Grade R teacher in the 3 www.payscale.com Accessed January 2021. R5000 is equal at current rates to US$240.90 or EUR

267.26. R7000 is equal to US$475.41 or EUR374.16.

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informal sector earns around R7000 per month. Some of the people earning this amount have children and depend on supplementation from child grants (currently R380.00 per month per child under eighteen). They would still find it impossible to make ends meet without complex and creative solutions to accommodation, food and transport requirements. In the context of a conservative estimate of 30% unemployment, most wages support more than the single earner. Government subsidies and schemes barely cover necessities. In areas where parents and carers are underor unemployed, incoming fees are kept low and hardly meet costs. The cost that is most flexible is the cost of the labour of the (mostly) women in these positions. Inadequate funding for this sector will always leave the situation unchanged and women will continue to agree to being paid less than enough. In a study into the proposed extension of the Expanded Public Works Programme (EPWP) of the Department of Social Development into the area of Early Childhood Development, Rose September (2017) noted that childcare and education, which contribute significantly to both the economy and to social stability, are grossly underfunded. A conundrum is created in which two groups of women are ‘set up against each other’: those needing low-cost childcare in order to work or seek work, and those providing under-funded services (September 2007, p. 9). These ‘power asymmetries’ (Barad 2007b, p. 219) perpetuate colonial patterns of misogyny and racialised economies. The work, skills, value, labour and investments of these (mostly) women are invisible in the current economic framework. What Anna Tsing (2015, p. 63), drawing on Marx, terms ‘salvage accumulation’ includes all the ‘natural’ and therefore ‘free’ inputs that are subsumed into capitalist economies. Rather like bottling air, an essential and priceless human requirement, the salvage economy capitalises on freely available ‘natural’ resources. This is the way capitalism works: raw materials like minerals, and human life and labour are the essential ingredients of capitalist production. Tsing reminds her readers of the violent extraction of ivory by the Belgian King Leopold II (1835– 1909), recounted by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, his novel set in the Congo and first published in 1899. ‘Savage and salvage are often twins: Salvage translates violence and pollution into profit’ covered up by ‘civilisation’ and ‘progress’ (Tsing 2015, p. 64). These things are initially produced outside of any capitalist processes. They are ‘discovered’, exploited, removed, often forcefully and with cruel violence, and commodified. The slave trade laid the basis for the dehumanisation of workers. Extractive relations towards land and life turn people and place into interchangeable parts of the expansive machine of colonial capital accumulation. One worker is no different from another, one mine-scape just as discardable as the next. Our humanimal capacity for care, love and nurturing cannot, on the one hand, be measured but on the other, it could be measured in the cost of its absence. The ECD ‘industry’ that enables parents to leave their small children for the whole working day in order to contribute to the country’s economy is almost invisible in the economic equation. People who take prime responsibility for the majority of children in our society get absorbed into and exploited by the labour machine that benefits from their efforts but contributes little or nothing to their maintenance. Their care, love,

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kindness and generosity are priceless and uncalculated, but are key to keeping the nation’s economy ticking. Without significant investment and funding, the sector will remain for most participants a possible steppingstone to better things, not a viable profession.

9.7 Reworking the Equations The misopedy that accompanies colonial ideas of progress (Kennedy 2006; Rollo 2018) frames child as closer to nature, and even bestial. In this view children are considered pre-rational and this justifies adult control and decision-making over issues relating to children and their needs. Not only are they a possession over which adults have dominance, their needs are seen as primarily physical or ‘natural’, as they are inherently ‘of nature’. This approach to the management of the affairs of child was extended to justify the paternalistic treatment of colonial subjects by categorising them as child-like, in contexts as diverse as ancient Greece and Apartheid South Africa. Rollo points out that the rationality attributed to the western adult male, ‘the standard of civilizational maturity’, and the basis for being included in the voting citizenry, was contingent on the acceptance of commodification and private ownership of property (Rollo 2018, p. 74). The ‘qualified franchise’ was also part of early colonial voting systems in South Africa prior to the total exclusion of all people designated ‘non-white’ in 1940. Race replaced income level and land ownership as a measure for inclusion on the voter’s roll. Sol Plaatje, who was of Tswana descent, but fully fluent in English and Dutch (among other languages) and earning over 50 lb a year, was able to vote in the Cape Colony election system from when he turned 21 in 1897. In 1910, the colonial laws were amended, and he was no longer recognised as a citizen. The colonial attitude to land is that it is a (privately owned) commodity. Ontologies that place land and other ‘inanimate’ objects—animals, trees, spirits of the dead—in horizontal relation to the human rather than as property or ‘resources’ for exploitation are considered primitive and undeveloped by Euro-Western knowledge systems. But counter narratives to objectifying possession and individual entitlement include those of ‘ownership in common’ and custodianship and have been present in both preand postcolonial land management practices. Increasingly, however, they are being eroded by powerful multinational corporations who are given more and more licence to commodify resources like water and land (Cavanagh and Mander 2004). The troubling of our conceptions of ‘human’ and ‘child’ is vital to the forging of new relationships and flattened ontologies of human and more-than-human relationality. The challenge to colonial practices of dispossession and land appropriation, and also to the destruction of ecologies largely by corporate exploitation, has implications for legal concepts such as ownership, inheritance and private wealth. Our national constitution claims to provide equal rights and even redress, but it works within a legal system that is pulled in different directions by competing interests. Diffractions of our constitution and various laws governing the ownership and

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management of land make visible some incommensurable and conflicting variances between worlds. The world of mining and global capitalism has the upper hand in the enactment of the Minerals and Petroleum Resources Development Act (MPRDA) of 2002. This act makes the state the custodian of all mineral resources in South Africa, and further states the Minister of Mineral Resources may grant a mining right to a mining company against the will of the landowner. In contrast, the Interim Protection of Informal Land Rights Act (IPILRA) of 1996 states that no one with ‘informal’ rights to land can lose it without consent. Communal owners of land in the former ‘bantustans’ or ‘tribal homelands’ fall into this category of owners and it is in their areas where most new mining projects are located, or where existing ones are looking to expand. In a double bind, communities in these areas are often vulnerable to unilateral decisions made by their own traditional leaders. Mahmood Mamdani has chronicled the co-option of the institutions of traditional leadership by the colonial and apartheid states through the ‘homeland’ and migrant labour systems. By creating and enforcing a system of ‘indirect rule’, colonial powers could keep Africans tied into a so-called tribal system of governance, and therefore outside of the laws and rights of ‘white’ citizens. Those considered productive would be forced to ‘straddle’ workplace and homeland ‘through an on-going cycle of annual migrations’ (Mamdani 1996, p. 7). These histories continue to manifest themselves in contemporary post-apartheid politics. The decade-long battle between the Xolobeni community in the Eastern Cape and the Australian mining company, Transworld Energy and Mineral resources (TEM) shows up the fault lines in the ‘land question’. While two successive Ministers of Mineral Resources sided with the mining company, and the local traditional leader, or ‘chief’, who was initially a supporter of the anti-mining protest by the community, made an about-turn after receiving a car and a directorship from the company, the community organised itself into the Amadiba Crisis Committee and sought legal assistance. Their resistance led to the assassination of anti-mining activist and Crisis Committee leader, Bazooka Radebe in March, 2016, after which the Minister instituted a moratorium on the granting of mining rights. In an online GroundUp article, journalist, Wilmien Wicomb asks: Why would members of the Umgungundlovu community be willing to risk their lives, literally, in order to defend their land? Because, for them, land is not simply a place to live, much less an investment to generate income. These households and their ancestors have lived on the land for generations. The land is central not only to their livelihoods, through grazing, cultivation, tourism and the like, but to their very identity. A household, called umzi, is more than a place of living. For the people of Amadiba, it is a symbol of social maturity and social dignity. It forms the basis of the relationship between the living and the dead, but also of the social fabric of the community today. You cannot relocate the community elsewhere without destroying that. The land is everything (Wicomb 2018).

The people, land, livestock, medicinal plants, agriculture and ocean are all close ‘kin’. The Amadiba Crisis Committee are committed to a more-than-human common

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worlding supported by a dynamic and ethically-constituted relational form of sustainable governance. Members express a commitment not only to current beneficiaries but to their children and their children’s children. In November, 2018, the High Court ruled in favour of the Xolobeni Community and in so doing asserted the legal standing of communities in relation to their appointed leaders. According to this ruling, the people themselves need to give their consent before the Minister can grant the mining rights. The battle continues with defamation cases being brought against environmental activists, lawyers, a journalist and a newspaper. In what might be seen as a diabolically cynical move, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs drafted two new bills which were signed into effect in parliament in December 2018. Known colloquially as the ‘Bantustan bills’ they directly contradict the IPILRA, confirming and extending the powers of traditional leaders and their mandate to represent communities in decision-making. Trouble continues to bubble.

9.8 Direct Democracy and Early Childhood To the north, in Italy, the work of the Reggio Emilia municipal system is part of a long established and on-going political project in which issues of equality and direct democracy are at the centre of their conception of just governance. Their postage conceptions of human and citizen produce particular patterns of democracy and ideas about what education for their youngest citizens means. Their commitments to decentralisation and flexibility are not merely the privileged products of a financially stable local government but rather hard won and fiercely defended strategic, ethical and political choices about knowledge, and the cultural, social and political status of ‘child’. Dahlberg and Moss (2005), Blaise, Hamm, and Iorio (2017) and Osgood (2012, 2019) challenge the early childhood education community to tackle the political and ethical aspects of the field. A posthuman ethics enables an attentive noticing and a ‘staying with the trouble’ in which issues of epistemic, environmental and economic justice are part of one complex entangled reality. Caring for kin is at the centre of a posthuman responsiveness and as Barad reminds us: ‘The acknowledgement of ‘nonhuman agency’ does not lessen human accountability; on the contrary, it means that accountability requires that much more attentiveness to existing power asymmetries’ (Barad 2007a). Despite the parallels and synchronicities with Reggio Emilia, a city like Johannesburg, with its repressive history (and present, especially if you are poor and/or an undocumented migrant) does not, despite a particularly conducive climate, easily accommodate ‘alfresco’ living. European-style pavement cafes and piazzas exist, but only in tightly controlled, privatised spaces, mostly in the wealthier northern suburbs. Public events can only take place if they comply with a number of requirements relating to public health, transport, safety and security have been met. Public parks are well used but are few and far between and in densely populated areas where they are most needed, tend to be dogged by intransigent problems such as poor or

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highhanded management, and ‘over-use’ by car-washers and homeless homemakers. Deeply ingrained and inherited habits of pass law policing allow for the possibility of being arrested for ‘loitering’. Informality is often read as criminality. Street sellers or ‘informal traders’ exist with an alert vigilance and can pack up their wares in seconds flat. Sometimes the city seems to be at war with itself. Much of the early childhood sector operates on an informal basis. As a business opportunity, it is one of the easiest entries into the market economy. A ‘daycare’ is easy to set up and requires minimal training and investment. ECD is not supported by government except through various subsidy schemes contingent on successful registration, as discussed earlier in Chap. 2. Grade R was made compulsory in 2001 and primary schools were encouraged to open Grade R classes. Plans for a compulsory Grade RR (for ages four to five) are in place, but fears are that this move will take livelihoods away from ECD entrepreneurs. Salaries of practitioners in the informal ECD sector are not paid by the state and have to be covered by incoming fees. Many parents spend more on childcare while their children are in preschool than later when they attend formal schooling from age six. School fees are kept low in public schools and on a sliding scale of quintiles one to five, one being the areas with lowest average income and five the wealthiest. There are non-fee paying schools in quintiles one to three, and an option for a fee exemption open to poorer families residing in areas with fee-paying schools. If an ECD centre is not a community-based non-profit organisation, like Siyakhula, it is likely to be a small business run by a ‘subsistence entrepreneur’. Profit margins in poor communities like the inner city are exceedingly tight. Many owners hire unqualified immigrant women so as to be able to at least make some profit. These women perform all the duties of caring and teaching and mostly learn on the job. They tend not to stay long in any one site, moving as soon as a slightly better opportunity arises. Undermining the relationships so central to learning, these patterns of provision discriminate once more against the very children who would benefit most from the leg-up of a ‘quality ECD’. While efforts to facilitate easier registration of sites and to extend the reach of government subsidies continues, on the ground, there are also innovative solutions being forged by collaborative partnerships. The Makers Valley Partnership,4 for example, is a network of organisations, creative artists and artisans, organic gardeners and a Children’s club in a suburb near to the one where Siyakhula is located. Like ArtMyJozi, they are collaborating with the City of Joburg, in this case through the Johannesburg Inner City Partnership (JICP). One of their members, Changemaker Children, is an Early Childhood project led by activist and PhD researcher, Simon Mayson and director of the Curriculum Development Project (CDP), Deyana Thomas. It connects more than ten ECD centres in their local inner-city area and offers, among other things, a mobile art and creative movement and performance activation service. Previously operating out of a large rucksack, art activator, performer, clown and experienced ECD practitioner, Lassie Ndalela now has a bicycle with trailer fully kitted out (Figs. 9.5 and 9.6). His interventions as Uncle Lassie work 4 Their

website is: www.makersvalley.org.za.

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Fig. 9.5 Lassie and his pack of creative movement and art activating materials. Photograph courtesy of Deyana Thomas

as an infectious energy that spreads a wild, warm way of working with children. In a moving telephone interview, Lassie described how in his previous job as an ECD practitioner he had suffered prejudice and suspicion as a male involved in childcare. While we are a society with high levels of child abuse, there is an inadequate understanding about the realities of the phenomenon. People are thus prone to making easy, often wrong assumptions because of anxiety about the safety of their children (and prejudices built on gender stereotypes). A Department of Justice register is now in place so that convicted abusers can be tracked, and childcare workers get official clearance to work in the sector. In the meantime, Lassie has moved on with positive energy and found a way to continue with his important work. He re-invented himself as a travelling atelierista and in this role and in his partnership with Changemaker Children, he has found a way to share his creativity, generosity and expertise with both children and their teachers. At the time of writing this chapter, his bicycle is being used to deliver food to hungry neighbours, as the corona virus, tiny, invisible and all pervasive, has shifted priorities (Fig. 9.7).

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Fig. 9.6 Uncle Lassie playing a make-believe game with a group of children. Photograph courtesy of Lassie Ndalela

Fig. 9.7 The artist delivers cabbages. Photograph courtesy of Lassie Ndalela

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9.9 Carrying on Carefully Attempting to write pedagogy as the entangled and intra-connected worlding that it is risks making a story that is way too big to fit in a single book. The materialdiscursive artful worlding of five-year-olds is already a sizeable one. ‘Too Big’ a story, in Haraway’s view, is one that claims big truths with predicted, planned conclusions. As long as my story remains unresolved and open to different endings, it will be ‘big-enough’ (Haraway 2016, p. 50). Ties tie knots in so many different ways. Time, space and matter cannot be fixed but work in ways that produce phenomena in ever new and different ways, making worlds in on-going emergence. The worldings of children in their spaces of learning, with their fellow earth-dwelling humans and more-than-humans, are a big enough story that makes it possible to leave the future to itself and to stay right here with the trouble. According to education researcher, Nic Spaull, the students who complete their final year of high school and are admitted into universities in South Africa are a scant 14% of the childhood population who entered school in Grade one (eNCA 2015). The arguments made about the rights of the black child in the ‘Fees Must Fall’ narrative are equally compelling when associated with the birth to five age group. In the funding of education, age has been a category of exclusion for far too long. Investment in early years has been drastically insufficient. Crèche fees must fall, but the call for free tertiary education cannot be ignored and has relevance for this sector. The Birth to four degree, recently introduced into the tertiary system, will only reap rewards with sizeable and focused funding for early childhood teacher education. A material discursive framing of early childhood is an agential cut that shows a disjointed, unequal and unethical set of relationships and systems—and this is the reality in a suburb of Johannesburg: the most well-resourced city in the wealthiest province in the second richest country in Africa. Fixing the system for the humans and the lost generations of learners is the goal of the best progressive programmes in education. But as the young rebels against climate change remind us, there is no point to education if there is no future. Temperatures rise, diversity diminishes before our eyes, and water and food security are no longer reliable expectations. Education in damaged colonial spaces is about learning how to inherit the damage and the leftovers. An ethics of care and a concerted effort at making queer kin relations (human and non-human) will work as a curriculum for now. As a motley crew of earth dwellers saying ‘yes’ to the lively invitations from our material world, while paying attention to the marks of erasure, division and exclusion, we can find ways to carry on in response-able and creative companionship. Children-learning-with-environments (an intra-active phenomenon) are intelligent and hopeful. Wilder and less predictable encounters with spaces of the city allow for science/art activations and for following lines of speculative flight. Importantly, these pedagogies are profoundly collaborative and intra-active. They depend on the nurturing of pedagogical relationships between all the humans (of all ages) and non-human participants and components of reality: stories and things, presents

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and pasts, surfaces and underneaths. Learning-with-the-park has produced knowledge about the inseparability of systems, management and finances from issues of pedagogy, curriculum and daily programmes of teaching and learning. Political and ethical choices need to be made, and central to these are the images we hold of ‘child’, of ‘teacher’ and of ‘land’.

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Tsing, A. L. (2015). The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Wicomb, W. (2018) ‘Xolobeni judgment is vital to land debate’, GroundUp, 23 November.

Index

A Abduction, 92, 97 Aesthetics, 10, 35, 43, 45, 53, 56, 60, 99, 101, 164 Affect; affectus, 3, 5, 28, 47, 48, 50–53, 55, 58, 60, 69, 79, 83, 87, 93, 97, 99, 101, 107, 110, 112, 114, 116, 154 African Nationalist Congress (ANC), 20, 126, 162 Africa Reggio Emilia Alliance (AREA), 158, 162, 163 Agential realism, 31, 61, 70, 85, 165 Andrew, David, 47, 48, 51, 53 Anthropocene, 14, 32–34, 125, 143, 145, 148, 156 Apartheid, 5, 6, 12, 13, 19, 23, 24, 121, 128, 132, 133, 139, 141, 151, 162, 165, 167, 168 Art; art-making, 2, 13–15, 25, 28, 33, 35, 39, 43, 44, 46–48, 53, 55–57, 60, 81, 88, 90, 92, 93, 125, 128, 135, 148, 149, 151, 158, 159, 170, 171, 173 Art-based pedagogies, 34 Artivism, 158 Art materials, 33, 48, 49 A/r/tography, 35, 56, 59 Atelierista, 28, 35, 39, 45, 56, 59, 87, 88, 128, 171 Atmore, Eric, 22, 23, 164

B Barad, Karen, 3, 4, 12, 26, 29, 31, 34, 39, 42, 51–53, 56, 63, 68–70, 78, 82, 83, 85, 92, 93, 105, 106, 115, 121, 122, 124, 130–132, 145, 166, 169

Becoming, 12, 13, 15, 16, 23, 52, 53, 55, 63, 67, 78, 81–83, 93, 94, 96, 100, 101, 105–107, 112, 114–116, 119– 121, 129, 132, 135, 143–148, 152, 164 Bénit-Gbaffou, Claire, 154, 155 Bennett, Jane, 5, 10, 26, 56, 63, 83, 85, 110, 116 Birth to four curriculum, 23, 27 Black Consciousness Movement, 5 Bollier, David, 153, 155, 158

C Capitalism, 29, 53, 54, 69, 70, 147, 166, 168 Care, caring, taking care, 6, 22, 24, 26, 27, 34, 42, 51, 54, 90, 131, 135, 139, 140, 143, 144, 146–148, 151, 154, 155, 157, 158, 163, 165, 166, 169, 170, 173 Changemaker Children, 170, 171 Child-centred, 26, 40, 51, 128, 164 Child development, 33 Childhood, 1–3, 5, 6, 12–15, 21–24, 26–28, 31–34, 48, 54, 56, 59, 67, 80, 85, 86, 88, 93, 106, 121, 125, 129–131, 138, 140, 146, 148, 151, 154–158, 161–166, 169, 170, 173 Child-rights, 127, 156 Chthulucene, 32 Colonisation; colonial, 4, 12, 13, 15, 19, 29, 32, 33, 60, 67, 69, 93, 122, 123, 125, 128, 130–133, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145, 147–149, 152, 153, 159, 164–168, 173 Commons, 7, 19, 33, 34, 51, 57, 59, 69, 71, 76, 79, 80, 85, 87, 89, 107, 126, 139,

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178 140, 148, 153–155, 161, 163, 167, 168 Compost; composting, 3, 5, 53, 85, 94, 132 Concepts; conception; concept as method, 5, 10, 12–14, 29, 30, 32, 34, 39, 42, 43, 46–48, 51–53, 55–58, 70, 78, 79, 81–83, 87, 92, 93, 99, 106, 107, 114, 115, 123, 127–130, 140, 142, 146, 153–156, 165, 167, 169 Congo, 135, 166 Constitution; SA constitution, 27, 132, 148, 153, 167 Corruption, 23, 165 Criminality, 165, 170 Curriculum Development Project (CDP), 13, 49, 170

D Dahlberg, Gunilla, 10, 22, 23, 25–27, 33, 69, 88, 148, 162, 169 Decolonising, 28, 69, 70 Deleuze; Deleuze and Guattari, 1, 3, 4, 12, 30, 31, 39, 48, 51–57, 69–71, 79, 83, 85, 92–94, 99, 105, 106, 114–116, 143, 156 Democracy, 27, 53, 58, 69, 138, 152, 154, 156, 162, 165, 169 Democratic Republic of Congo DRC, 126, 136 Department of Basic Education, 2, 31 Department of City Parks and Zoo, 154 Department of Education (DoE), 22, 58 Department of Social Development (DSD), 6, 22, 27, 157, 164, 166 Descartes; Cartesian, 29, 68–70, 79, 81, 83, 86, 92, 107, 115, 116 Desire; desiring, 49, 52, 57, 59, 85, 86, 93, 106, 119, 131 Developmentalism; developmentality; child development, 4, 12, 13, 21–23, 26, 27, 31, 33 Difference, 1, 5, 12, 14, 15, 31, 42, 46, 51, 54, 57, 60, 61, 63, 71, 78, 88, 97, 101, 105, 107, 158, 161, 165 Diffraction, 3, 34, 35, 68, 69, 71, 85, 101, 105–107, 116, 121, 133, 146, 147, 158, 165, 167 Documentation, 13, 28, 34, 43, 46, 48, 57, 60, 80–83, 85, 87, 101, 121, 125, 144, 147, 154

Index E Ebrahim, Hasina, 22, 26, 27, 32 Emergence; emergent curriculum, 23, 31, 34, 43, 46, 47, 55, 60, 71, 80, 87, 173 Enquiry, 2–4, 12, 15, 34, 42, 43, 52, 53, 57– 59, 80, 87, 88, 92, 93, 97, 99, 110, 128, 132, 136, 148 Entanglement, 3, 4, 28, 34, 50, 53, 63, 68, 79, 82, 85, 86, 88, 93, 94, 96, 105, 106, 131, 132, 141, 148, 156, 164 Environment; environmental education, 9, 14, 15, 25, 28, 32, 39, 46, 48, 51, 52, 55, 56, 58, 79, 86, 87, 105, 129, 140, 141, 145, 148, 153, 156, 158, 164, 165, 173 Ethico-onto-epistemology, 51, 120, 143 Ethics of care, 26, 155 Ethics; posthuman ethics, 3, 14, 25, 26, 30, 34, 51, 60, 107, 119, 143, 155, 157, 158, 165, 169, 173 Extended Public Works Programme (EPWP), 158, 166 Extinction, 1, 2, 32, 70, 124, 157

F Fairies, 51, 60, 89, 97–99 Fantasy corner, 87 Fees must fall, 138, 154, 173 Feminist; feminist philosophies, 3, 4, 26, 29, 30, 33, 53, 60, 70, 71, 85, 92, 122, 143, 155 Finance; financial irregularities, 21, 164, 174 Fröbel, Friedrich, 33, 56, 106, 131

G Gauteng, 1, 88, 142, 158, 162, 163 Gender, 30, 31, 100, 171 Gosani, Bob, 128–130 Grade R, 2, 6, 21–24, 43, 45, 49, 50, 60, 67, 71, 79, 80, 97, 105, 110, 116, 146, 165, 170 Grosz, Elizabeth, 39, 55, 56, 60 Group Areas Act, 5

H Haraway, Donna, 3–5, 10, 14–16, 32–34, 51–54, 60, 61, 63, 69, 85, 94, 122, 143, 145, 146, 149, 157, 173 Harrison, David, 22, 23 Hauntology, 123–125 Haynes, Joanna, 27, 58, 59, 82, 92

Index Helfrich, Silke, 140, 153, 155 Humanism, 14, 29, 30 Human rights, 5, 153 Hundred languages of children, 8

I Inequality, 14, 19, 22, 29, 59, 69, 70, 121, 132, 140, 148, 157, 164 Ingold, Tim, 48, 61, 63 Injustice, 5, 13, 28, 51, 69, 156 Inside; inside/outside, 3, 22, 43, 48, 56, 69, 81–83, 93, 106, 114, 116, 119, 126, 127, 131, 140 Intelligence, 13, 15, 24, 28, 34, 42, 59 Intra-action, 12, 31, 33, 48, 56, 58, 60–63, 67, 68, 71, 78, 81, 83, 86, 87, 97, 105, 106, 114–116, 128, 135, 140 Irwin, Rita, 35, 56

J Johannesburg; Joburg, 1–4, 6, 12, 13, 24, 34, 47, 121, 125, 126, 128, 135, 136, 139–142, 145, 151, 152, 155, 156, 158, 161–163, 169, 170, 173 Justice, 2, 14, 57, 63, 123, 124, 156, 169, 171

K Kennedy, David, 57, 82, 85, 92, 93, 167 Kin, 135, 145, 151, 157, 158, 168, 169, 173 Kind, Sylvia, 2, 59, 60 Kohan, Walter, 12, 52, 57, 59, 67, 81, 85, 92 Kuby, Candace, 2, 34, 86, 116

L Land, 6, 14, 32, 57, 68, 121, 126, 141, 148, 153–155, 166–168, 174 Land Act, 126, 132 Life skills; Life skills curriculum, 2, 15, 146, 152 Lipman, Matthew, 58, 67, 82 Listening; listening pedagogy, 16, 39, 42, 45, 57, 59, 63, 87, 148 Love, loving, 6, 7, 32, 52, 57, 67, 69, 71, 74, 79, 100, 143, 166

M Malaguzzi, Loris, 8, 28, 39, 53, 56, 86, 92, 119, 146, 147, 163 Malone, Karen, 130, 148, 154, 156, 160

179 Material, 14, 24, 30, 31, 33–35, 42, 43, 46– 48, 51, 53, 56, 58, 61, 63, 68–70, 78, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 93, 97, 100, 101, 105, 106, 110, 114, 119, 124, 125, 131, 136, 141, 142, 152, 166, 171, 173 Matter, 3–5, 10, 26, 29, 51, 53–55, 68, 82, 85, 86, 107, 113, 124, 130, 131, 135, 145, 146, 173 Mattering, 81, 93 Mbembe, Achille, 138, 139, 151, 160 Meaning; meaning making, 3, 14, 25, 31, 40, 48, 51, 53, 55–58, 67, 68, 78, 79, 83, 99, 151, 159 Mermaids, 51, 77, 89–91, 98, 99, 101 Migration, 123, 126, 140, 168 Mimosa school, 158 Mining, 14, 125, 130, 132, 141–143, 148, 156, 168, 169 Minority, 19, 32, 70, 93, 156 Minor; minor politics, 27, 28, 155–158 Misopedy, 165, 167 Modest witness, 16, 42, 59, 122, 128 Monism; monist ontology, 31, 42, 92 Montessori, 33, 39, 45, 47, 56 Moss, Peter, 10, 22, 25–27, 33, 69, 88, 148, 162, 169 Multimodal, 25, 47, 51, 57, 119 Murris, Karin, 12, 26, 27, 31, 34, 53, 57, 58, 61, 82, 85, 86, 92, 115, 116, 128, 143, 148

N Names, 6, 12, 20, 24, 28, 32, 34, 35, 51, 67– 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79–83, 110, 115, 116, 123 National Integrated ECD Policy, 157, 164 Nature, 13, 14, 27, 29–33, 47, 55, 56, 63, 69, 83, 97, 106, 119, 124, 129–131, 138, 141, 145–148, 153, 155–157, 160, 162, 167 New materialism, 3, 34, 70 Non-human, 3, 14, 26, 29, 31, 42, 45, 53, 55, 61, 63, 81, 82, 119, 125, 133, 139, 141, 145, 146, 151, 154, 173 Nxumalo, Fikile, 15, 32, 68, 122, 130, 146, 148, 156 Nzongola-Ntalaja, Georges, 143

O Olsson, Liselott Mariett, 40, 54, 86

180 Ontology; ontological, 29, 30, 34, 51, 53, 60, 70, 107, 115, 122, 123, 143, 148, 153, 165, 167 Open streets, 158–163 Osgood, Jayne, 169 Ownership, 4, 13, 19, 60, 88, 114, 139, 152, 153, 155, 163, 167

P Parks, 3–7, 10–12, 15, 22, 39, 62, 81, 105– 107, 110, 112, 114–116, 118–123, 125, 126, 128, 130–133, 136, 140, 141, 143–148, 152–155, 169, 174 Participation, 19, 70, 153, 154, 158 Pass laws; pass; pass books, 24, 83, 125, 132, 133, 151, 156, 170 Pedagogy, 2, 3, 12, 14, 15, 24, 25, 28, 30, 33–35, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53, 57, 83, 86, 88, 93, 113, 127, 128, 130, 137, 145, 146, 152, 161, 162, 173, 174 Perception, 51, 83, 92 Phenomena, 50, 55, 70, 93, 105, 119, 124, 125, 165, 173 Philosophy with Children (P4C), 12, 33, 34, 42, 51–54, 57–59, 82, 83, 87, 90, 92, 93, 128, 136 Piaget, Jean, 33 Plaatje, Sol, 121, 126, 152, 167 Pluriverse; uni(pluri)verse, 12, 29, 154 Poiesis, 35 Policy; ECD policy, 14, 21–23, 25, 27, 48, 88, 139, 153, 154, 157, 164 Politics; minor politics, 25, 27, 28, 49, 92, 125, 139, 156, 158, 163, 168 Posthuman ethics, 169 Posthumanism, 30, 31, 42, 53, 153 Post-qualitative, 2, 3, 61 Post-structuralist, 30, 129 Public; public space, 5, 22, 24, 26, 49, 56, 105, 107, 121, 127, 132, 135, 136, 138–140, 148, 151, 154, 155, 157–160, 164–166, 169, 170

Q Quantum; quantum physics, 3, 29, 70, 106, 107, 124, 131, 143 Queering, 100, 131

R Race, 5, 115, 129, 133, 142, 156, 167

Index Radioactivity, 141 Recycling; recyclables, 48 Reggio Emilia, 8, 10, 12, 13, 25, 28, 33–35, 39, 42, 45, 47–49, 57, 80, 87, 88, 140, 154, 158, 161–163, 169 Relationality, 3, 34, 35, 45, 51, 60, 79, 124, 132, 143, 148, 154–156, 167 Representation, 25, 35, 40, 51, 97, 100, 106, 131 Research creation, 3 Response-ability, 33, 53, 69, 124, 143, 147, 155, 156, 164 Rhodes; Rhodes must fall, 138, 139 Rinaldi, Carlina, 49, 87, 88, 146 Rose, Deborah Bird, 60, 143, 166 S Salaries, 21, 170 Science; “normal” science, 2, 26, 29, 31, 32, 35, 39, 47, 49, 54–56, 69, 81, 92, 93, 107, 125, 127, 128, 143, 147–149, 173 Services; ECD services, 1, 5, 6, 22, 23, 26, 27, 49, 71, 88, 155, 157, 166, 170 Siyakhula Daycare Centre, 5, 6, 20, 42 Slowing down, 57, 81, 101, 152 Speculation, speculative thinking, 85, 87, 128 Spinoza, Baruch; Spinozist, 29, 31, 48, 52, 55, 57, 70, 85, 92, 114, 115, 143 Springgay, Stephanie, 2, 35, 53 Subsidy; ECD subsidy, 6, 22, 166, 170 Sundberg, Juanita, 12, 30, 53, 122, 132 Sympoiesis, 34 T Tausa, 128–130, 132, 133 Temporal diffraction, 60, 131, 132 Thing power, 5 Thinking with, 10, 14, 92, 106, 116, 119, 127, 128, 131, 133, 135, 136, 158 Third nature, 147 Third teacher, 28, 147 Time, 1, 2, 4, 20, 21, 23, 24, 43, 46, 51, 56, 58, 61, 62, 68, 71, 77, 78, 80–83, 86–88, 93, 94, 100, 101, 105, 106, 108, 110, 112, 116, 119, 121–125, 128, 130– 132, 135, 140, 142, 152, 161, 162, 165, 171, 173 Travel hopping, 131 Trinity Session, 158 Tuck, Eve, 69, 130

Index

181

U Uni(pluri)verse, 3, 12, 29, 30, 51, 55, 56, 63, 70, 93, 106, 107, 124, 154 Universal child, 32, 33 Universalist ethics, 25, 153, 156 Unlearning, 132, 144 Uranium, 141–143

Witwatersrand, 14, 140, 142 Wonder; wonderment, 7, 51, 56, 57, 69, 85, 86, 90, 92, 164 Worlding; worlding with, 10, 30, 31, 33, 34, 42, 51, 68, 69, 78, 82, 93, 106–108, 111, 119, 121, 127, 131, 139, 143, 154, 155, 169, 173

V Vecchi, Vea, 10, 39, 43, 45, 53, 56, 87, 88 Virtual; virtuality, 13, 78, 93, 106, 119, 131, 161

X Xolobeni, 168, 169

W Waste materials, 48 Whiteness; theorising whiteness, 5, 110, 139 Wilding; wilder, 5, 30, 32, 59, 145, 173 Wings, 52, 97, 142, 163 With-ness, 107, 121

Y Yang, K. Wayne, 69, 130

Z Zaire, 135 Zama zama’s, 142